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Typographic marks allows to quickly visualize the organization of a structured text and help the readers to navigate through a document. This technic is especially useful in scientific literature to support author's statement, to point to related topics elsewhere and to build a logical argumentation/demonstration.

Typographic (or other graphical design strategy) can be an excellent support to the understanding of dense text and complex thinking.

§2 Minimal example of typographic marks usage

       ¶1 Section sign (§) are typographic marks for sections. Pilcrow (¶) are sometime used to highlight paragraphs. This kind of marks may be useful for further references.

       ¶2 In this paragraph, we refer to the content of §1 which is the last section. You can find in §1.3 a discussion about subsection usages and §1.5 is about meta or chapters-like usage. Unfortunately, this last section is not written yet!

My question is:

Is there any mark specific for chapters?

I did not find any. But most of books or other big document are split in chapters. A typographic mark would be nice to replace things like:

see chap. 1 §1.3

If this kind of mark do not exist, what are the most commonly used conventions to refer to chapters? What are the pros and cons of these methods? Where could I find more information about intra-document referencing methods?

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  • Hello jvtrudel, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your question. If you want to know more about the site, please see the help center or ping one of us in chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site! Mar 29, 2015 at 13:07
  • 2
    I understand than historically, "intra textual" references and internal cohesion of texts was the major issue. But it seems than "modern" documents use extensively references to content outside of their own scope. Chapters are a simple example, but more complex situations appear in cross-referencing. Also, web based documents drastically changed the linear scheme of writing and reading texts. In my opinion, the clicable-link schemes is not satisfactory and maybe typographic marks could inspire interesting alternatives. Anyone has suggestion of symbols suited for chapter marks?
    – jvtrudel
    Mar 29, 2015 at 13:58

1 Answer 1

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I've never seen a specific Chapter marker. It may be because commonly intra-chapter references are mainly to clarify the text inside a single chapter only, and each chapter may be supposed to stand on its own.

Techniques range from highly abbreviated to highly wordy, e.g.

Ch.1
Chap. 1
Chapter 1
See "Basic Introduction to Writing Long Texts" (Chapter 1) ... (full title, quoted or italicized. Don't italicize if you already use it to refer to other books.)

et cetera.

For a distinctive, recognizable look, try something such as small aps:

We say earlier on in ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 1 that ...

or

As can be seen in Cʜ.3, later on, a long text can be divided into sections ...

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  • 7
    Don't use "Cʜ", anyone who knows Cyrillic will be confused to oblivion at first.
    – Etheryte
    Mar 29, 2015 at 13:41
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    @Nit: possibly true :) – one of the dangers of using small caps. But does this mean something entirely else, then?
    – Jongware
    Mar 29, 2015 at 14:01

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