Text style guide

Atjaunināts pirms 2 years

    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