I personally find colors to be distracting and nonstandard ways of carrying such information. I like Samuel Marks’s idea of using monospace fonts for strings or formalizations as opposed to concepts. I also VERY MUCH prefer talking about strings vs concepts than map vs territory, as the territory isn’t actually available in any text, only different levels of map (in this kind of document; there are other conversations where it makes perfect sense to use map/territory).
Depending on the topic and text, you might also consider physical separation rather than typography as the differentiator. A column for one level of narrative, alongside another column for a different (more objective) level of description. Or more humorously, an OOC injection between paragraphs like
Narrator: Dagon thinks self-reference is fun. Not everyone agrees.
But even more than any specific, I’d love to see some experimentation. Write a sample paragraph, and try out the 3-4 leading styles. If you’re into it, write a preprocessor that generates multiple styles from the same input, and let readers choose their preference.
I personally find colors to be distracting and nonstandard ways of carrying such information. I like Samuel Marks’s idea of using monospace fonts for strings or formalizations as opposed to concepts. I also VERY MUCH prefer talking about strings vs concepts than map vs territory, as the territory isn’t actually available in any text, only different levels of map (in this kind of document; there are other conversations where it makes perfect sense to use map/territory).
Depending on the topic and text, you might also consider physical separation rather than typography as the differentiator. A column for one level of narrative, alongside another column for a different (more objective) level of description. Or more humorously, an OOC injection between paragraphs like
Narrator: Dagon thinks self-reference is fun. Not everyone agrees.
But even more than any specific, I’d love to see some experimentation. Write a sample paragraph, and try out the 3-4 leading styles. If you’re into it, write a preprocessor that generates multiple styles from the same input, and let readers choose their preference.