Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Lou Iorio wrote:
I can certainly live with your rules; I was simply looking for
justification. I have seen none yet.
I am sure that when Janet Swisher gets to work on Monday (assuming she
hasn't taken the week off for Thanksgiving), she will be able to find
the authoritative sources we referred to when making our decisions
about things like capitalisation.
As I said earlier, I'm not at home where my reference books are. (And
I won't be there until early December.) Otherwise I would have pointed
to them immediately.
I'm not sure precisely what source we referred to in making that
specific decision. (It might have been Hentzenwerke, since Jean has
published with them, and she let us reuse some of her content.) I think
the primary consideration was ease of application of the rule. We wanted
to have as few rules as possible and to keep them as simple as possible,
while still achieving a modicum of consistency. (For a while, we tried
to keep the /OOo Style Guide/ to 2 pages so it would print on a single
sheet, but that didn't last.)
We wanted simplicity because we are all volunteers here, and most of our
writers and reviewers are not professionals (in those roles). I'm a
professional writer and editor, and nonetheless, I keep a tape flag on
section 8.167 of /CMS/ because I can never remember all the rules for
headline style capitalization. (E.g., "Lowercase prepositions,
regardless of length, except when they are stressed ..., are used
adverbially or adjectivally ..., are used as conjunctions ..., or are
part of a Latin expression used adverbially or adjectivally ...." --
phew! -- This conflicts with many other sources, which say to capitalize
prepositions longer than 4 characters.)
As Daniel said, our volunteers' time is much better spent on improving
content than on trying to decide whether to capitalize "through". While
the /CMS/ is about the closest thing I have to a Bible, I still exercise
judgement in following its commandments. In this case, practicality won out.
However, for a style guide that endorses sentence-style headings, try
/Xerox Publishing Standards/, published in 1988. (If not old enough to
be a dinosaur, it is at least pre-Web, and is the granddaddy of a number
of corporate technical documentation style guides I've used.) It
dictates headline style only for document titles, and "downstyle" for
essentially every other kind of heading or caption.
The /Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications/ gives rules
for headline capitalization, but concedes "Many books and Help topics
now capitalize only the first word of chapter titles and other headings;
design guidelines are less formal than in the past. ... If your design
does not use traditional capitalization, follow your design guidelines."
--
Janet Swisher --- Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc. http://www.enthought.com
