Design/Guidelines/UIWriting

Use this guide when writing English UI copy and help content for LibreOffice.

Dialect
Source strings should be written with the US spelling (-ize rather than -ise, et cetera). We have British English translators who provide localization for the European variant.

Punctuation
Hyphenate prepositive compound adjectives: well-known procedure, but This procedure is well known. When pairing an adverb ending in -ly, there is no need to hyphenate (finely-tuned is inappropriate).

End complete sentences with a period. If your UI copy consists only of a sentence fragment (e.g., a short tooltip), then don’t add a period.

Capitalization
Two styles are used in UI copy: sentence case and title case.

Title case

It is used for:
 * Headers and headings; i.e., window and section titles.
 * Push widgets and command names; i.e, menus and buttons.

In this style, one makes an exception for articles, coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions.

Sentence case

It is used for:


 * Tooltips and in-dialog descriptions
 * Labels: check boxes and radio buttons.

Contractions
Avoid them. They strike as too casual for our tone of voice, and may hinder understanding for non-native speakers.

Typography
Historical computing limitations (there was a time before Unicode existed when you couldn’t write a multilingual document!) and questionable US-centric design choices for keyboard layouts (I’m looking at you, IBM!) have taught our generation that a quotation mark or a prime should be written as: " . In fact, in the history of the written language, this character is very, very recent—it’s only a remnant from the times where typewriters had a limited amount of keys, so symbols had to be spared. Even worse, for my native language, there were many typewriters that didn’t include the figure “ 1 ” because it could be simulated by a lowercase “ l ”. Would you write ells instead of ones today? I don’t think so. So why do you still provide UI copy like we are in the ’80s?

Leveraging Unicode is not only good for precision, if you care about semantics. Taking care of UI microtypography also gives our application professionalism—it shows that we care about our product, and signals users that they, too, can create such polished documents with our application. And if there is a technical limitation preventing us from taking advantage of Unicode, then that is a bug that should be fixed.