Do we have a style guide?

[Rob Weir <ro...@apache.org>]

By a style guide, I mean a list of conventions that we agree to use,
for the sake of consistency,

It would cover things like:

1) When we refer to the user, do we refer to them in the 2nd person as
"you", or third person as "the user", or "the author"?

2) When we refer to Apache do we say "We" or "The Apache OpenOffice
project", e.g., "We welcome your bug reports" versus 'The Apache
OpenOffice project welcomes..."

3) Conventions for what text styles to use for text the user should
enter,  for referring to menu items, etc.

Many other similar things.

If we don't, maybe it would make sense to have a self-describing page
that does a little of everything, so we can illustrate the style to
new volunteers.

-Rob

Re: Do we have a style guide?

["Keith N. McKenna" <ke...@comcast.net>]

Rob Weir wrote:
> By a style guide, I mean a list of conventions that we agree to use,
> for the sake of consistency,
>
> It would cover things like:
>
> 1) When we refer to the user, do we refer to them in the 2nd person as
> "you", or third person as "the user", or "the author"?
>
> 2) When we refer to Apache do we say "We" or "The Apache OpenOffice
> project", e.g., "We welcome your bug reports" versus 'The Apache
> OpenOffice project welcomes..."
>
> 3) Conventions for what text styles to use for text the user should
> enter,  for referring to menu items, etc.
>
> Many other similar things.
>
> If we don't, maybe it would make sense to have a self-describing page
> that does a little of everything, so we can illustrate the style to
> new volunteers.
>
> -Rob
>
Rob;

There is an OOo style guide in ODT format available from the ODFAuthors 
site. This was the guide used for all the OOo 3.x documentation. Like 
most things pertaining to documentation it is somewhat out of date, but 
it is a start. There are also some documents on the wiki that can be 
updated 
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/Help_Style_Guide#Formats 
is one that is referred to in the style guide.

Keith