: What are standard techniques that indicate to the documentation reader that they are to substitute their own appropriate text (e.g. username, domain)? When reading manuals or guides, I can easily

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Robert Lauriston is correct. <> is the proper way to document user input in code in Microsoft Documentation.

Many folks are suggesting using % signs to document user input in documentation, That would be incorrect in Microsoft Documentation.

% signs are used as system environment variables in Microsoft.
i.e. %SystemRoot% refers to the installation directory of Windows. (usually: C:Windows)

Microsoft explains "Environment Variables"

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As the other anwers show, different practices have been established for various systems.

It is important to differentiate between texts that mainly address people who are aware of such technicalities and texts that address people who are not aware of them.

People who fit into the first group will usually expect this type of substitution because they are used to it. The methods given in the other answers will suffice: these standards have been established for a reason.

Users who are not accustomed to technical writing and the corresponding style of documentation may struggle with such instructions.
In addition to optically emphasise the term to be replaced, it may help these users to add remarks for clarification, such as:

In the following code snippet, replace partition with the name of
the device you want to create the ext4 filesystem on:


# mkfs.ext4 /dev/partition

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I prefer angular brackets <> and hyphenated text inside. For example:

URL format: <your-host-name>:<your-port-number>.com/
The text should be something that would make it obvious for user to understand that it needs to be replaced with actual value. This also takes case of any accessibility considerations.

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Depending on different operating systems/platform, the user is restricted to use special characters.

For example, Windows restricts to use special characters while creating a folder/file but Linux allows to use special characters to use naming a folder/file.

Documentation/manual for a software/platform is prepared by keeping all that in mind.

While researching to answer this I came across this beautiful software documentation document, it mentions

Documentation formats for user-entered commands or codes shall clearly
distinguish between literals (to be input exactly as shown) and variables
(to be selected by the user).

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I like the way GitHub documentation handles this by using a different color and style:

Just using a different color is not enough, as there are vision-impaired readers.

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%per cent signs% immediately come to my mind, as in "Welcome, %username%!"

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