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7.5.1 Name and key

Every style sheet has both a key, and a name. The name can be clean and beautiful, with any character you might want. The key is in fact the prefix part of the file name, and is alpha-numerical, lower case, and less than 8 characters long.

Anywhere a2ps needs to recognize a style sheet by a name, it uses the key (in the sheets.map file, with the option ‘-E’, etc.).

As an example, C++ is implemented in a file called cxx.ssh, in which the name is declared to be ‘C++’.

The rationale is that not every system accepts any character in the file name (e.g., no ‘+’ in MS-DOS). Moreover, it allows to make symbolic links on the ssh files (e.g., ‘ln -s cxx.ssh c++.ssh’ let’s you use ‘-E c++’).