How to use this book

The bot­tom of each page has nav­i­ga­tional links for the pre­vi­ous page, next page, top page, and chap­ter in­dex (where ap­plic­a­ble). You can change the body text font by click­ing on a font name.

Fur­ther­more, you can:

Roll over the page edges to see these click­able areas.

Use the font picker at the bot­tom of the page to change the font used for body text. The font picker can be de­tached and moved around the page.

Cross-ref­er­ences, de­noted with small caps, are click­able. This is an homage to ref­er­ence works like Gar­ner’s Mod­ern Eng­lish Us­age (see bib­li­og­ra­phy), which com­monly for­mat cross-ref­er­ences in the same style. If you own one of these books, you’re fa­mil­iar. If you don’t, buy one.

Links to out­side ma­te­r­ial are de­noted with a red cir­cle, like so. For three reasons:

  1. To dis­tin­guish them vi­su­ally from in­ter­nal cross-ref­er­ences—a small sig­nal that “hey, you’re now leav­ing the book”. (Oc­ca­sion­ally I bend this rule, but don’t panic.)

  2. Yes, I’m aware that web hy­per­links have typ­i­cally been un­der­lined. But un­der­lin­ing is noth­ing more than an odi­ous type­writer habit, held over on web­sites be­cause of in­er­tia. It was tol­er­a­ble in 1994 when web browsers could do so lit­tle. But not to­day, when they can do so much.

  3. Vig­or­ously styled hy­per­links on a page tend to move to the fore­ground of a reader’s at­ten­tion, like an HDTV in a ho­tel bar. (See also max­ims of page lay­out.) The red cir­cle is meant to be no­tice­able while you’re read­ing the sen­tence that con­tains the link. Oth­er­wise it dis­ap­pears, so as not to distract.

Of course, the main rea­son hy­per­links have his­tor­i­cally been over­styled is be­cause gen­er­at­ing clicks on those links is es­sen­tial to in­ter­net ad­ver­tis­ing. Here, you will find no ad­ver­tis­ing—just us read­ers. The de­sign is tai­lored ac­cord­ingly. 

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