Style guides lend experience

InfoDesign lends a pointer to the GNOME Documentation Style Guide. Worth taking a peek at, it is surprisingly complete for an open source project. It's a shame that more companies don't make their style guides available to the public, doing so would help elevate the overall state of the documentation industry. The lessons and advise contained in most of the guides is hard-earned and often self-illustrating.

The GNOME style guide has a very short, but important section on "non-objectives". That is, what shouldn't the documentation attempt to do? Don't distract user's from their task, and don't try to cover up the inadequacies of the product.

By the way, Apple's Style Guide is also freely available. Download Apple Style Guide PDF. Finally, Microsoft's style guide is available for purchase, if you can find it in stock.

Posted: September 3, 2002 link to this item, Tweet this item, respond to this item