The following is a list of the typographical conventions used in this book:
Italic
Used to indicate new terms, URLs, filenames, file extensions, directories, commands and options, and program names. For example, a path in the filesystem will appear as /Developer/Applications
.
Constant width
Used to show code examples, the contents of a file, or the output from commands.
Constant width italic
Used to show text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.
Constant width bold
Used to show text that is input by the user.
A carriage return () at the end of a line of code is used to denote an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enter these as two lines of code but as one continuous line. Multiple lines are used in these cases due to printing constraints.
$
, %
, #
The dollar ($
) and percent (%
) signs are used in some examples to show the prompt of the bash
or tcsh
shell; the hash (#
) mark is the prompt for the root user.
Menus and their options are referred to in the text as File → Open, Edit → Copy, and so on. Arrows are also used to signify a navigation path when using window options; for example, System Preferences → Accounts → Login Items means that you would launch System Preferences, click the icon for the Accounts preference panel, and select the Login Items pane within that panel.
When looking at the menus for any application, you will see some symbols associated with keyboard shortcuts for a particular command. For example, to create a new project in Project Builder, you would go to the File menu and select New Project (File → New Project), or you could issue the keyboard shortcut, Shift--N. The symbol is used to refer to the Apple menu in the upper-left corner of the screen.
In the text, you will see the same thing referred to sometimes as “directories” and sometimes as “folders.” The term “directory” is used when referring to directories in the command line or in the Unix part of the OS. When using the Finder and other GUI applications, however, the traditional Mac OS term “folder” is used.
You should pay special attention to notes set apart from the text with the following icons.