The guidelines presented here are meant to give Linux Documentation Project authors greater control over their manuscripts, rather than relying on an editor who may or may not have the time to edit a LDP document to commercial editorial standards.
The topics covered here should be familiar to any author who has ever worked with a publisher. Included are sections on type styles of various text elements; headings and subheadings; index entries; and references and citations.
The primary source for these guidelines is the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed., by the University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual's guidelines are widely accepted by the publishing industry. The guidelines presented here address the needs of computer documentation and the technical nature of the LDP documents, and are based on accepted practices of the computer publishing industry and print media in general. In matters of debate, however, the final authority should be the Chicago Manual.
Index entry formats are based on the guidelines presented in
LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, by Leslie Lamport, and
the makeindex
manual page.
For guidelines of formatting text with the SGML-Tools software package, please consult the SGML-Tools User's Guide, by Matt Welsh and Greg Hankins.
For guidelines of formatting text with LaTeX, please consult Lamport, above.