An adaptable, copyleft-licensed style guide for technical writing about computer hardware and software projects and products.
- Creative Commons license
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Remix and republish as you see fit.
- Readily customizable
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Designed to be tailored to your application/needs without forking the codebase.
- Forkable
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Clone the Git repo and maintain a parallel version or just take it in your own direction.
- Independent
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Maintained by tech-writing enthusiasts from multiple companies and freelancers with no allegiance to any corporation or faction (including you?).
This project is primarily about quality style guidelines, high usability, and single-sourced automation assistance.
The editorial team will do its best to make a widely applicable, context-aware, ethically conscious guide to enable clear, consistent technical communications for a broad range of software and hardware terms, contexts, and challenges.
The format and organization will be holistic yet flexible. We will take into account multiple ways users will approach our resources and offer as many ways to consume and reuse them as we can sensibly maintain.
We will also provide as much help for your automation tools so you can sensibly single-source Vale rules and reader-facing content.
As an experimental objective, Free Styles will include “generic”/“neutral” glossary-style definition entries for at least some portion of the terms which can be optionally made end-user-facing in your public documentation.
This project needs an editorial committee. If you are interested, please sign up here. There will be several tiers of involvement and commitment, so you’ll be able to participate how you prefer.
I will be recruiting from and seeding discussions in the #style-guides channel in Write the Docs Slack community — please join in there.
If you just want to use, review, and nit-pick our work, you will of course be welcome to do so without joining anything. Just stay tuned.
If you would rather be involved in the open-source tooling end of this undertaking, check out the Open Styles Project.
Free Styles will be a codebase of style rules and terms in the OpenSGY markup format (stands for style guide YAML, pronounced “open siggy”) established by the OpenStyles Project under DocOps Lab.
For now, it is just this README and the Creative Commons license. Watch this project to keep in touch.