In written narrative such as fiction, sections are not usually numbered or named. Section breaks are used to signal various changes in a story, including changes in time, location, point-of-view character, mood, tone, emotion, and pace. As a fiction-writing mode, the section break can be considered a transition, similar to a chapter break.
Some documents, especially legal documents, may have numbered sections, such as Section Two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or Internal Revenue Code section 183 . The section sign (§) may be used in referring to sections and subsections. Subsections are often written in lowercase Roman numerals, e.g. Section 51(xxvi) of the Australian Constitution.
The dotted-decimal section-numbering scheme commonly used in scientific and technical documents is defined by International Standard ISO 2145.
A document may also be considered to be divided into sections by its headings and subheadings, which may be used for a table of contents. For example, the hierarchical sections used in Wikipedia can be compiled into a table of contents for an article. Many books, however, only have chapter headings in the table of contents.
While a chapter may be divided by section breaks, a group of chapters is conventionally called a "part", often identified with a Roman numeral, e.g. "Part II".
Reference material may be divided into sections. The section headers of a Chinese dictionary are one example.
Flourished section breaks
Space between paragraphs in a section break is sometimes accompanied by a dinkus (* * *), an asterism (⁂), a horizontal rule, fleurons (❦), an ellipsis (. . .) or other ornamental symbols. An ornamental symbol used as section break does not have a generally accepted name. Such a typographic device can be referred to as a dinkus, a space break symbol, a paragraph separator, a paragraph divider, a horizontal divider, a thought break, or as an instance of filigree or flourish. Ornamental section breaks can be created using glyphs, rows of lozenges, dingbats, or other miscellaneous symbols. Fonts such as Webdings and Wingdings include many such glyphs.
In HTML, horizontal rules can be generated using the <hr> tag, which generates a paragraph-level thematic break. For more ornate presentation, CSS can be used to replace the line with an image.
The ellipsis... is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term originates from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis meaning 'leave out'.
In typography, a bullet or bullet point, •, is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:
• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3
The pilcrow, ¶, is a handwritten or typographical character used to identify a paragraph. It is also called the paragraph mark, paraph, or blind P.
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.
The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or silcrow. In other languages it may be called the paragraph symbol.
A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page numbers.
In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, or as a dinkus. Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.
An outline, also called a hierarchical outline, is a list arranged to show hierarchical relationships and is a type of tree structure. An outline is used to present the main points or topics (terms) of a given subject. Each item in an outline may be divided into additional sub-items. If an organizational level in an outline is to be sub-divided, it shall have at least two subcategories, although one subcategory is acceptable on the third and fourth levels, as advised by major style manuals in current use. An outline may be used as a drafting tool of a document, or as a summary of the content of a document or of the knowledge in an entire field. It is not to be confused with the general context of the term "outline", which a summary or overview of a subject, presented verbally or written in prose. The outlines described in this article are lists, and come in several varieties.
In typography, an asterism, ⁂, is a typographic symbol consisting of three asterisks placed in a triangle, which is used for a variety of purposes. The name originates from the astronomical term for a group of stars.
A chapter is any of the main thematic divisions within a writing of relative length, such as a book of prose, poetry, or law. A book with chapters may have multiple chapters that respectively comprise discrete topics or themes. In each case, chapters can be numbered, titled, or both. An example of a chapter that has become well known is "Down the Rabbit-Hole", which is the first chapter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
***, a series of three asterisks, may refer to:
International standard ISO 2145 defines a typographic convention for the "numbering of divisions and subdivisions in written documents". It applies to any kind of document, including manuscripts, books, journal articles, and standards.
The hyphen-minus symbol - is the form of hyphen most commonly used in digital documents. On most keyboards, it is the only character that resembles a minus sign or a dash so it is also used for these. The name hyphen-minus derives from the original ASCII standard, where it was called hyphen–(minus). The character is referred to as a hyphen, a minus sign, or a dash according to the context where it is being used.
In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell, or tab.
A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text is rendered for display by a computer.
A signature mark, in traditional bookbinding, is a letter, number or combination of either or both, which is printed at the bottom of the first page, or leaf, of a section. The aim is to ensure that the binder can order the pages and sections in the correct order. Often the letters of the Latin alphabet have been used. The practice has been overtaken by advances in printing technology, and signature marks are rarely found in modern books.
The Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 jointly collaborate on the list of the characters in the Universal Coded Character Set. The Universal Coded Character Set, most commonly called the Universal Character Set, is an international standard to map characters, discrete symbols used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other domains, to unique machine-readable data values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, and transmit—interchange—UCS-encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple interpretations depending on the character encoding in use, resulting in mojibake if the wrong one is chosen.
A subscript or superscript is a character that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps most often used in formulas, mathematical expressions, and specifications of chemical compounds and isotopes, but have many other uses as well.
A fleuron, also known as printers' flower, is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves; the term derives from the Old French: floron ("flower"). Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats". A commonly encountered fleuron is the ❦, the floral heart or hedera. It is also known as an aldus leaf.
In typography, a dinkus is a typographic symbol which often consists of three spaced asterisks in a horizontal row, i.e. ∗ ∗ ∗ . The symbol has a variety of uses, and it usually denotes an intentional omission or a logical "break" of varying degree in a written work. This latter use is similar to a subsection, and it indicates to the reader that the subsequent text should be re-contextualized. When used this way, the dinkus typically appears centrally aligned on a line of its own with vertical spacing before and after the symbol. The dinkus has been in use in various forms since c. 1850. Historically, the dinkus was often represented as an asterism, ⁂, though this use has fallen out of favor and is now nearly obsolete.
