Typographic conventions used

The monospace font indicates shell window output, filenames and names of environment variables; keywords, functions and operators in Tao's synthesis language; and finally verbatim examples which should be typed exactly as shown.

The monospace bold font is used in the index to highlight entries for keywords, functions and operators in Tao's synthesis language.

The italic font indicates important terminology being introduced for the first time.

In addition to the above conventions sometimes it is necessary to indicate where the user needs to supply some values in a Tao script. For example in the following script fragment <pitch> and <decay time> would need to be replaced with appropriate values by the user:

    String myString(<pitch>, <decay time>);

Finally Tao refers to the entire software package whereas tao refers to the name of the shell command used for executing a Tao script.