Text style guide

Updated 2 years ago

Introduction

This document attempts to clarify the various language and stylistic decisions of the English version of the MuseScore user interface. It is initially focused on the MuseScore strings maintained in Transifex, but should be applicable to documentation.

Text capitalization

Title capitalization

is when all words are capitalized except for certain words. Capitalize all words except the following if they are not the first word of the sentence:

  • Articles ("the", "a" and "an")
  • Conjunctions ("and", "or" and "but")
  • Prepositions having less than five letters, (e.g. "for", "in", "with" or "to", "from" or "under"). It includes "to" as part of an infinitive ("to Walk"). But it excludes the preposition part of a verb phrase, as in “Starting Up the Program.”

Sentence capitalization

Sentence style capitalization is when the first letter of the sentence, statement, phrase, or label is capitalized and all other words are lower case. The only exception to this is proper nouns which are always capitalized.

When to use sentence and title capitalization

Control Capitalization
Accessibility information Sentence
Button label Title
Checkbox label Sentence
Combo box item Title
Combo box label Sentence
Group box title Title
Menu item Title
Page names Sentence
Tooltips Sentence

Word capitalisation

  • Only abbreviations should be capitalized.
  • Non-abbreviation words should use title or sentence capitalisation as per the above guidelines.

Language

  • Standard: US English (we have a British English 'translation' to cover the differences)

Parenthesis brackets

Space between full stop and new sentence

Elipsis versus three dots

Comma before "and" in lists of 3 or more items

Quotes: single versus double quotes

  • Standard: none yet
  • Define one of the TS-files wth variable $PO (does not have to be translated since we are looking at the source)
    • Single quotes ', "'": 160
      grep "<source>" $IF | grep "&apos.*&apos" | less
    • Double quotes ", "&quot;": 9
      grep "<source>" $IF | grep "&quot.*&quot" | wc -l
  • Discussion: todo (single quotes have advantages inside C/C++ strings, in that they don't need to get 'escaped', i.e. no need to prefix with a \, backslash, like \")

Resources