Style guide

General

Case

All text is to be written in sentence case. This includes all paragraphs, headings, group names and page titles.

GitBook renders some text in BLOCK CAPITALS, such as group names in the Summary on the left of the screen. However, you should use sentence case when editing this text.

Capital letters should be used in proper nouns (e.g. "MusicXML") and abbreviations ("UI") if this is the official or generally used form, but not for contractions of everyday speech (e.g. use "aka" rather than "AKA").

UI text

When writing instructions for the user, text that appears in MuseScore's UI should be copied verbatim and highlighted in bold (e.g. "Press the Not now button").

URLs

Within URLs, a plain domain name should be captilized like the brand name (e.g. MuseScore.org), but not when a longer URL is used (e.g. musescore.org/en/download).

Structure

Pages

You're currently viewing the Style guide page, which is a subpage of About the handbook.

Page titles

Page titles should be relatively short. Ideally the title should fit on one line in the Summary on the left of the screen, although this may not always be possible. Bear in mind that page titles may be significantly longer when translated to other languages besides English.

Tips to keep page titles short:

• Avoid saying "score" (e.g. "Selecting elements", not "Selecting elements in the score")

• Avoid saying "MuseScore" (e.g. "Upgrading", not "Upgrading MuseScore Studio")

Subpages

When subpages are used, only one level of subpages may be used. Never create a subsubpage.

Parent pages should have very short titles because its title appears in the URLs of all its subpages.

In general, we prefer to use groups rather than subpages, to avoid nesting in the Summary.

Groups

Groups are like chapters. They are CAPITALIZED in the Summary on the left of the screen.

Groups should have very short names. This is because the group name appears in the URLs of all pages within the group.

It is possible to edit the group slug to make it shorter than the actual group name. However, in general, this should not be done. Instead, the group name should be made as short as possible.