Heading capitalization in handbook

• Jul 24, 2009 - 04:24

The following post is in response to a disagreement at: //www.musescore.org/en/handbook/text-style

The handbook uses sentence capitalization for all titles and headings. This is a style guide choice that is used by many others including Firefox documentation , Wikipedia articles , and most news publications (USA Today , Economist , etc.).

The advantages of sentence case for headings:

  1. It is simpler to understand and do consistently (there are many varieties of "Title Case" and it is difficult to remember which variety you are using)
  2. Looks more modern
  3. Easier to read

This is the style guide choice for English versions of the handbook. Obviously other languages are free to make different choices.


Comments

I hope this doesn't pull out pedants and grammar nazis out of the wood work, but...

When the article title in question is that of a UI element that is formatted capitalized as a proper noun, shouldn't it's article title look the same way?

In MuseScore "Text Style" is capitalized as a proper noun, I was just shooting for consistency. I understand using "Sentence case" for readability in long headings, but most of the handbook article are less then three words and correlate to UI element texts.

Perhaps we need to agree on the style of the MuseScore English UI texts as well. Before I went through and changed the UI texts to all Title Case it was a big mish-mash between differing capitalization styles and all lowercase.

I'm pro the sentence capitalization for the handbook. However, we will need to have a consensus about the MuseScore UI as Raymond indicated and have it logged into a MuseScore style guide. As a non native English speaker, I don't have an opinion about the UI styling.

In reply to by Thomas

Looking through Firefox's UI, it uses Title Case in the menu system and for dialog section headings, and uses Sentence case for option texts in the preference dialogs with capitalization on words that refer to other menu headings or dialogs.

It's going to take a while to sort through, but I'll give it a go using that formatting as style guide. I do agree sentence case is easier to read.

In reply to by Thomas

Apple has detailed guidelines for capitalization of UI elements .

Although there are different conventions for software written for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, the capitalization seems to be cross-platform. If in doubt look at some other software (as you have already done) as a reference such as Firefox, Microsoft Word, etc. One UI element not mentioned in the guidelines linked above are tooltips. For what it's worth Firefox uses sentence-case for tooltips (e.g. "Reload current page"), Microsoft Word uses title case (e.g. "Align Right"). I had already started to make some of the tooltips sentence case for example all tooltips for the note durations used to be lowercase only in version 0.9.3.

In reply to by David Bolton

Odd they left out tooltips.

I think it's a good idea to stick to that styling as it seems to be based on a fairly pervasive standard.

Sentence case for tooltips works for me.

I've been going through the en_US.ts today applying that same style (as apple UI guidelines) and should have an update sometime soon.

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