texinfo: Indicating

Marking Text

Emphasis

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9.1 Indicating Definitions, Commands, etc.
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Texinfo has commands for indicating just what kind of object a piece of
text refers to.  For example, metasyntactic variables are marked by
'@var', and code by '@code'.  Since the pieces of text are labeled by
commands that tell what kind of object they are, it is easy to change
the way the Texinfo formatters prepare such text.  (Texinfo is an
_intentional_ formatting language rather than a _typesetting_ formatting
language.)

  For example, in a printed manual, code is usually illustrated in a
typewriter font; '@code' tells TeX to typeset this text in this font.
But it would be easy to change the way TeX highlights code to use
another font, and this change would not affect how keystroke examples
are highlighted.  If straight typesetting commands were used in the body
of the file and you wanted to make a change, you would need to check
every single occurrence to make sure that you were changing code and not
something else that should not be changed.

Useful Highlighting

Highlighting provides useful information.

@code

Indicating program code.

@kbd

Showing keyboard input.

@key

Specifying keys.

@samp

Indicating a literal sequence of characters.

@verb

Indicating a verbatim sequence of characters.

@var

Indicating metasyntactic variables.

@env

Indicating environment variables.

@file

Indicating file names.

@command

Indicating command names.

@option

Indicating option names.

@dfn

Specifying definitions.

@abbr

Indicating abbreviations.

@acronym

Indicating acronyms.

@indicateurl

Indicating an example url.

@email

Indicating an electronic mail address.