Appearance
As in the examples below, reference cards are typically one to a few pages in length. Pages are organized into one or more columns. Across the columns the reference is split into sections organized by topic. Each section contains a list of entries, with each entry containing a term and its description and usage information. Terms might include keywords, syntactic constructs, functions, methods, or macros in a computer language. In a reference card for a program with a graphical user interface, terms may include menu entries, icons or key combinations representing program actions.
Due to its logical structure and conciseness, finding information in a reference card is trivial for humans and requires no computer interaction. It is therefore convenient for a user to print out a reference card. While reference cards can be printed on card stock, it is common to print them on ordinary printer paper. With the advent of portable electronic devices that can display documents, digital reference cards stored in PDF or HTML formats have become more common. This in contrast to user guides, which tend to be large & verbose and to have a very low information density (in comparison to reference cards).
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Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Hence, the less government we have, the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“February is a suitable month for dying. Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)