Tim Murray wrote:
You folks are probably already annoyed by me, but it's what I do ...
annoy people ...
Heh. Yes, editors are good for that. I do it a lot myself. :-)
- The mouse is the physical device. It's quite rare that you ever use
this word.
- The I-beam is the I-shaped graphic element you see when you type.
- A cursor is an underscore character you see in older DOS-type screens.
Rarely used.
- Use pointer to refer to the arrow or other shape that moves when the
user moves the mouse or other pointing device. Although the pointer can
assume many shapes, do not use descriptive labels to refer to the
pointer. It is all right to use descriptive labels in a discussion of
the different appearances the pointer can take. (I ripped this off from
the Microsoft Style Guide. You may dislike the company, but the style
guide is excellent.)
We never use the term I-beam, and rarely use the term "insertion point"
which I've seen in a lot of docs for MS products.
Most people understand "cursor" to mean "insertion point" even though,
technically, that's not what it is, as you noted above. I think (but
haven't checked) that most OOo documentation (including the help) tends to
use the term "cursor", so that's what we use.
We use the Sun style guide (Read Me First), 2nd edition, btw -- NOT the
Microsoft book. The Sun guide is also excellent, and a lot more relevant to
us because of OOo's association with Sun and the fact that OOo is
multi-platform. However, the Sun guide does not have an extensive list of
terms to use, though it does have some to avoid.
Jean
