Library of Formatting Examples:Signatures/00A

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Page image

Correctly-formatted text

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of men and women, the searcher of hearts, the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the glorious country that gave him birth. /*[*** Right-justified, so enclose in no-wrap.] <sc>William Archer.</sc> */[*** Small caps, with period INSIDE.]

General instructions

Signatures occur in many contexts: letters, prefaces (such as this example), dedications, citations, and as attributions at the end of poetry or verse.

1. Left-justify them, even if they are indented or right-aligned in the image.
2. They almost always need to be enclosed in no-wrap, because they're usually indented, but not the way paragraphs are indented.
3. When there is a "complimentary closing" (e.g., "Your obedient servant," or dates, all of those lines usually can go in the same pair of no-wraps.
4. When they are on the same line as the "closing," move the signature to a line of its own, possibly even leaving a blank line between them.
5. If a signature is in small caps (or italics), mark it that way. If there's also a period after it, determine whether the signature is part of a "sentence" or is its own "sentence." In practice, this means looking at what precedes it to see whether there's a comma or a period. If the preceding punctuation is a period, then the period after the signature goes inside the inline markup; if the preceding punctuation is a comma, then the period after the signature belongs to the overall "sentence" and the period goes outside the inline markup.

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