[ZDP] Outline of style guide

[Ute Methner]

Thank you for your feedback, Rik. 

My negligence, I should have pointed out on my previous email the 
philosopy behind the decisions I made in setting up this style guide. 
The style guide content I posted is an outline of the types of topics 
that will be covered in the guide. The style guide covers both online 
and hardcopy versions of Zbook. Where applicable, the guidelines for 
the online and for the hardcopy version will be explained in individual 
sub-sections of each topic and will appear as such in the table of 
contents. 

My choice of arranging the guidelines by topic rather than online 
vs hardcopy is to make it easier to find information and to keep 
the size of the style guide manageable. If you look at the 
Production section of the guide, you will see that content structure 
for online and for hardcopy documents will be individually
addressed in the style guide. 

I am also considering posting the style guide in pdf as well as html
format.

Regarding, electronic indexes, auto indexing software for HTML exists,
but I haven't yet had the time to investigate it. It's on my TODO
list :-)

Hope this makes it a little clearer.

Ute


Rik Hoekstra wrote:

> 
>
> Ute,
> 
> This is an excellent outline of a styleguide. Obviously it is
> modelled after a styleguide for printed matter and that will do for
> most of the cases of electronic writing, but it does not cover
> everything. I understand making the styleguide will be a _lot_ of
> work, but you asked for comments yourself...
> 
> A few points:
> - even if the paper and electronic version of a publication are
> single sourced, it is not necessarily so that they are exact copies.
> Even if text and graphics are the same, presenting them on different
> media make them different anyway.
> It would be nice to have a set of guidelines for the ways they should
> be the same and the ways they should be related (I know this is no
> simple issue, I'll be glad to help thinking). Some points:
> 
> - printed pages may be (much) longer than electronic pages
> - hyperlinking makes referencing different. Referencing online
> resources from paper and from electronic versions is different.
> - this is even more so if you consider including other parts in your
> text, which is possible in XML, but also in a set of WWW pages (this
> also bears upon legal matters)
> - electronic indexes probably require a different approach than paper
> indexes
> 
> I probably forgot other things.