Conventions used in this document

The original The Z-Machine Standards Document used very little in the way of formatting, only a little bold to highlight keywords and values, and italics for emphasis. This version is far more liberal with formatting, using:

  • bold for keywords and programs/tools/packages

  • italics for emphasis or citations

  • monospace for exact command lines or code samples

  • bold monospace for opcodes

  • tables for tabular data that previously used monospace/“pre” for rendering

  • hyperlinks have been added for cross-section references (rather than just refering to “S1.1″, say, it’s now “S1.1″)

  • text adventure game names are italicized like a book title rather than ‘quoted’, purely to make the resulting text prettier

  • M.N sections are given names from the M contents at the top of the page

The spelling in the original document uses British English for the most part, and no spelling changes have been made. The annotations are generally in American English.

When significant commentary is made, it will be in a “sidebar”, shown as:

This is a sidebar example

It might contain just a quick note, or maybe a long monograph.

This is an example inside the sidebar.