Working on a style guide

[Phil Bull]

Hi guys,

On Sun, 2009-06-14 at 13:38 -0500, Belinda Lopez wrote:
> Ah, nevermind - I see how the content is divided up now.  But just FYI
> the Gnome folks are telling us their Style Guide is out of date and
> needs some attention.  We're looking at ways to help them with that
> process that will benefit both projects and others.

OK, there's an outline up on the WOS website:

http://writingopensource.com/node/14

I think that the idea at the moment is to produce a general *open source
style guide* which individual projects can then customise for their own
needs.

At the moment, the Ubuntu style guide currently refers to the GNOME
style guide, which refers to/is based on the Sun style guide, which
probably refers to the Chicago manual of style or something else. This
is convoluted, and Chicago isn't freely available. The plan is to have a
"root" style guide for a whole host of open source documentation
projects (we're talking about everyone: GNOME/KDE/Xfce,
Ubuntu/Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva, Drupal, ...). This would provide a shared
"vanilla" style, which is advantageous because each project doesn't have
to come up with a whole style guide from scratch (lots of work), and we
can standardise on a lot of terminology (consistency between the docs
for different packages installed on the same system).

Each project can then make modifications to the vanilla style with its
own project-specific terminology and information on how to handle
situations which are irrelevant to other projects.

***ALL FEEDBACK WELCOME***

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull