gnuplot is a command-driven plotting program. It can be used interactively to plot functions and data points in both two- and three-dimensional plots in many different styles and many different output formats. Gnuplot can also be used as a scripting language to automate generation of plots. It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data. gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don’t have to pay for it. You are welcome to download the source code.”
If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
> If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
If you read closely, you’ll notice that only “x” level headings use title case, “x.y” level headings use sentence case; there is no clear instance of “gnuplot”, capitalized or not, in title case anywhere in the document. The only arguable case is the page header “gnuplot FAQ”, but since it is sui generis there is no way other than inferring from capitalization in the rest of the document of telling whether its titlecase or just the preferred labelling of the product followed by “FAQ” (and the context suggests the latter).
You see people use "Gnuplot" quite a bit because many of us have an aversion to starting a sentence with a lower case letter, even in the case of proper nouns and titles. gnuplot is not […]
Most of us don’t care about forcing the first letter to be always lowercase, and in fact feel it’s a lost cause. But I agree that after such an explicit clarification I would expect to see “gnuplot” everywhere in the official documentation, except for this particular excerpt and when they refer to “GNUplot”. Otherwise it is clearly inconsistent with what they are explaining.
Yes, I also read the body text after the numbered heading in the prior excerpt, which makes two different choices in sentence-starting position in sentence case. But what I was responding to was the inference of a rule bases on usage in “title font” (which seems to be a reference to title case), not a complaint about the inconsistent use in sentence case. Hence, the except you provide here isn't really germane to anything I've said.
> If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.
The section titles are in sentence case, not title case. You would not expect it to be capitalised unless it were the first word of the title. The inconsistency in that paragraph is in the first sentence.
gnuplot is a command-driven plotting program. It can be used interactively to plot functions and data points in both two- and three-dimensional plots in many different styles and many different output formats. Gnuplot can also be used as a scripting language to automate generation of plots. It is designed primarily for the visual display of scientific data. gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable; you don’t have to pay for it. You are welcome to download the source code.”
If it’s lowercase in title font, it should be lowercase everywhere.