Technical Editor

[Detroit]

The OOoAuthors template guide and template hasn't changed much during the past year, although some minor changes have occurred. One project of mine is to construct an XML-based template whereby the author/reviewer need not be much concerned with formatting. In addition, the former template would also be retained, but it may be modified.

The writer would have a limited amount of possible available constructs. And once chosen, the formatting would occur automatically. Therefore, some potential sources for errors would be reduced. However, the author/editor would still have to make the proper selections.

Hopefully, there's enough packaged setups already prepared so that adapting one or more of them will fill the bill. Structured authoring wouldn't be required, however, but will just be another authoring/editing tool for producing our documentation.

In any event, we should agree on whatever formatting options or guidelines are needed and what could be dispensed with. Ditto for the style guide. In fact, it would not hurt if the template and style guides were combined into one document.

One style guideline consideration that might be adopted is to change from the headline style for heading capitalization for the chapter titles so as to better agree with the other subheads. We already use the sentence style for subheading capitalization: only capitalize proper nouns and adjectives and the first letter of the heading or subtitle. But we use the headline style for the chapter titles.

So, I propose switching those also to the sentence style. A rule of thumb: literary works, such as prose or poetry use the headline style, and technical works use the sentence style. Ours obviously falls into the technical variety.

We previously had some suggestions via the email mail lists. Now, it's about time to consider just what changes are needed, if any. Version 2.3 is about to be released, so that our template should be based upon that particular version of the software and that we should all use the same template and OOoAuthors custom styles.