User:Chapka/Style Guide

This is a working draft of a style guide for the Library of Formatting Examples.

A style guide is a set of standards to help create consistency within a document and between related documents. The goal of this Style Guide is to be a tool that helps us create a consistent, helpful, easy to read Library of Formatting Examples (LoFE). These are not hard and fast rules, but guidelines intended to help both writers and readers. Feel free to break them if it makes sense in context, but please follow them unless there's a reason not to.

General principles

• Distributed Proofreaders has volunteers from all over the world. However, for consistency, use American spelling where there is a choice of correct spellings. For example: color, not colour; theater, not theatre; organize, not organise.

Capitalization

Use sentence case for headings and titles in the LoFE. Capitalize the first word, and after that only capitalize proper nouns and other words that are always capitalized. For example: the heading to this section is "In headings," not "In Headings".

Specifically:

• Do not capitalize terms like "Small Caps" or "Thought Break".
• Do not capitalize words for emphasis, except in monospaced fonts where other forms of emphasis are not available. See the next section for details.

Emphasis

• Use boldface for most forms of emphasis. By default, the LoFE displays in a sans serif font; boldface shows up better than italics in sans serif, especially on a screen.
• Use italics for book titles, foreign language terms, and other commonly italicized matter other than emphasis.
• Use ALL CAPS for emphasis only in plain text passages, such as formatted example text.
• If you are linking to another document, such as the Formatting Guidelines, it is not necessary to also emphasize it; the hyperlink is enough.
• Never use "quotation marks" for emphasis.

Terminology

Book vs. project

Not every project at Distributed Proofreaders is a book. Use "project" whenever it makes sense to do so. However, book is a useful shorthand and should be used where "project" would be awkward or unclear. For example:

Always review the Project Comments before working on a project.
The copyright notice normally appears near the front of a book.

Avoid other terms, such as "work" or "text".

ebook

The preferred terms for a book presented in any electronic format are electronic book or ebook. Avoid "e-book" and "eBook."

Front Matter/Back Matter

When discussing front and back matter, you may want to specify whether items that have their own formatting requirements, like tables of content or indexes, are included.

Gesperrt

Gesperrt is the term we use at Distributed Proofreaders to text with wider than usual spacing between letters, used for emphasis in German and some other languages. Be aware that this term is not widely used outside of DP; consider including a clarification like "gesperrt (spaced-out text)" or a hyperlink to the Gesperrt section of the LoFE.

Heading vs. header

A heading introduces a text or a section of a text; for example, a chapter number and title is a heading; so is section number. A header is something separate from the text; for example, a page number, or a repeated title at the top of a page. If the Formatting Guidelines treat something as a chapter or section break, it is probably a heading, not a header.

Indexes, not indices

Use "indexes" as the plural of "index".

Library of Formatting Examples/LoFE

The Library of Formatting Examples is too long a name to use in full. Shorten it to the LoFE (with a lowercase "o"), or these examples (with a lowercase "e").

Proofing and proofreading

The words proofing, proofreading, and proofreader can be confusing. They are sometimes used for the whole Distributed Proofreaders process, from P1 to F2, and sometimes just for the proofreading rounds but not the formatting rounds.

Use "proofing" or "proofreading" if the meaning is clear in context; for example:

This is a proofing task, not a formatting task

In other cases, consider a more specific term, like "the proofreading rounds."

Small caps

Follow the Formatting Guidelines in distinguishing between:

ALL CAPS,

all small caps, and

Mixed Small Caps or Mixed Case Small Caps.