HCi Style Guide publicly available

This month sees the publication for the first time of The HCi Style Guide for Technical Documentation. A distillation of the knowledge acquired by HCi’s project managers over many years, the style guide forms a basis for developing good technical documentation. It provides advice on issues of grammar, punctuation, layout and design. In addition, it describes the use of the HCi templates for Microsoft Word and FrameMaker that accompany the style guide.

HCi have published the style guide as a small book to be made available to its technical writers. A PDF version of the style guide along with the templates are also available for general download from:

www.hci.com.au/downloads

Printed copies are available from HCi.

The templates include a practical set of manageable styles, which can be tailored as needed. The templates are designed for paper or online output. The style guide covers suitable conversion processes. In this way the templates directly support the generation of both hardcopy and online publications from a single source.

The purpose of the style guide is twofold. It ensures a level of consistency in the quality of documentation produced by writers working on HCi projects. In addition, it can be used by anyone looking for style guidelines for their particular documentation requirements, which might range from software user manuals to policies and procedures. 

The content of the style guide encompasses the following:

About HCi
About this document     
Elements of style and formatting            
User documentation generally    
Document structure (hierarchy of elements)       
Document structure (description of elements)     
Headings and sub-headings       
Formatting and structuring procedures   
Using numbered steps   
Using bulleted lists        
Table layout      
Using emphasis 
Using graphics  
Punctuation       
Language          
Cross-referencing         
Indexing           
Glossaries         
About the HCi template            
Template features         
Template contents         
Using the template        
Loading the template     
Creating a new document based on the template            
Creating a new topic     
Creating a numbered list            
Creating a bulleted list   
Creating a table            
Inserting a graphic         
Creating a note (emphasised paragraph)            
Creating an index          
Creating a glossary term            
Creating a cross-reference        
Pagination         
Producing outputs         
Paper-only       
Paper and online           
Online only       
List of template styles    
Sample procedure        
Shutting down the workstation  
Glossary           
Bibliography     
Notes   
Index    

This article may be reproduced only with the permission of HCi (email HCi ). Copyright HCi, 2001.