Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Axes, Labels, and Headings
The space constraints on axes, labels, and headings may mean that some terms have
to be abbreviated; for example, see the table in Fig.
11.15
. It is helpful to state these
terms in full in the text discussing the illustration, but do so in a natural way.
The abbreviations “comp.”, “doc.”, and “map.” stand for “compression”,
“document”, and “mapping table” respectively.
The effect of compression on the documents and the mapping table is illus-
trated in the second and third rows.
Where appropriate, units should be stated in labels. Write “Size (bytes)”, not just
“Size”.
Some readers get confused by scaling on axes and labels. Suppose, for example,
that an axis is labelled as “CPU time (seconds
10
−
2
)”. The convention is that the
reader should multiply axis values by 10
−
2
, so that 50 means 0.5. But some readers
may assume that the axis values have already been multiplied by 10
−
2
, so that they
read 50 as 5000. In the text where the illustration is referenced, typical values can be
discussed to avoid this problem. The problem also arises with graphs; it is helpful
to include some representative numbers in the text, because graphs are hard to read
with any precision.
×
Figure 4 shows how time and space trade off as node size is varied; as can be
seen, response of under a second is only possible when size exceeds 11 Kb.
Sometimes the terminology of a paper gets changed at a late stage, perhaps with a
global substitution. Ensure that graphs and diagrams get updated too.
