A commercial invoice
An invoice whose lines and totals fall where the text puts them, and whose square code lets a telephone pay the exact sum into the exact account with nothing retyped.
The notes a program leaves itself
A press room sends a proof out and gets it back three days later with a pencil note in the margin. To pick the job up again it has to know which run the sheet belongs to, which plate the page was set for, and which ink the colour bar was drawn against — and none of that is anything the person holding the sheet should be shown. So it travels under the document instead of on it: the file carries the run, the page carries its plate, and the colour bar, placed twice on that page, carries the ink it was set against.
Each of those three is filed under the name of the program that left it, so two programs leaving notes in the same document never read each other's, and each is stamped with the moment its program last touched it. None of it is drawn, and no reading software shows any of it: what is on the page is a proof, and what is under it is how the press room finds its way back. It rides along with the file wherever the file goes, and is waiting when the program that wrote it opens the document again.
What this example shows
- The file carries the run, the page its plate, the drawing the ink it was set against.
- Each packet is filed under the name of the program that left it and stamped with a moment.
- Nothing of it is drawn, and no reading software shows any of it.
The source code, complete
Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for whoever writes your software. The third is the description itself: a plain list of what the page has to say, which is what the service is sent.
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The document itself
Examples near this one
A delivery note
The note that travels with the goods: a barcode against each article, a box the receiver ticks, and the consignment's own code.
A payslip
A payslip: eighteen contribution lines with employee and employer shares, the month against the year to date.
A two-page services contract
A services agreement over two pages where no clause is ever cut in half by a page turn, ending in signature, name and date fields filled in on screen.
A landscape certificate
A certificate whose border, ribbon and seal are drawn as lines rather than photographed: sharp at any size, and a fraction of the weight.
A boarding pass
A boarding pass carrying, as a square code, the one line the gates at an airport read — one character out of place and it is refused.