Style Guide for English Pages

This document consolidates some of the writing style recommendations that have arisen as the site has been developed. If you are adding new material, please try to observe these conventions so that pages maintain some sort of uniformity.

Quotation marks

• Use single quotes for words being mentioned in a sentence that are not part of the sentence.
• Use double quotes for actual quotations (e.g. quoting from documentation or a person).
• Use double quotes for titles of articles.

Italics

• Use italics for new terms that are being introduced, when they appear with an immediate explanation or definition.
• Use italics for variables inside code. E.g., \bibliography{*yourbibfile*}
• Use italics for titles of books.

Inline code

• Use code formatting for things like pdflatex, bibtex, biber when referring to running the program itself. Use ‘pdfLaTeX’, ‘BibTeX’, ‘Biber’, etc., when referring to the program outside of such contexts.
• Similarly, use code formatting for package names, when referring to the package specifically. Packages or sets of package that have well-known names such as TikZ or psTricks can be formatted as such when talking about them generally.

Spelling

• Please use US standard spelling conventions.