This document uses the conventions described below.

The terms are arranged in ASCII order with the case of the characters ignored. This is the same as if the terms were sorted by this Linux command:

# sort -f

This means that spaces, symbols, and digits come before alphabetic characters. Digits are sorted as strings, not numeric values (“10” comes before “2”).

The exact ASCII collating sequence is as shown below, with a space character in the first position:

There are some exceptions to this rule when it makes more sense than strict ASCII order:

The full phrase is shown before the acronym. For example:

An exception is when the acronym is used exclusively to refer to the term, in which case the acronym is shown before the full form:

When an acronym is part of a phrase and is defined separately, its full form is not shown:

As shown in the examples above, all lowercase is used for terms except when the predominant usage is initial uppercase or all uppercase.