Typesetting Recommendations

See also: The rules and additional guidelines for in-house material.

Character set choice

P1. Unicode should be used as the character set, unless a mark-up language is being used which has support for identifying Unicode characters independently of the encoding.

P2. Where Unicode is not available, a character set which is itself a code- by-code equivalent subset of Unicode is strongly preferred—US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 are both acceptable.

Use of character sets like EBCDIC, RISC-OS-Latin1, Windows-1252 and Big5 (which are not completely code-by-code equivalent) is strongly discouraged.

Character choice

P3. Ellipsis should be encoded as three periods and not using the Unicode character HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS.

Period leading thereby becomes the province of the setting engine and not corrupted by the designer of the font in use.

P4. Primes should be encoded separately and not using combined forms like Unicode's DOUBLE PRIME and TRIPLE PRIME.

Corollary to recommendation 3.

P4. Decimal point should be distinct from period.

Decimal points are typically placed in the middle of the vertical space occupied by numbers.

Correct emphasis

P5. Avoid underlining and bold face in ordinary body text.

Web pages are allowed to use underlining to indicate links, but consider using a style sheet where colour is used to indicate links for visually able persons. Use a dark colour like blue for links unless this would render the text illegible given the chosen background colour.

Technical manuals sometimes benefit from sparing use of bold face to deliberately draw attention to salient points, such as the definition of a piece of terminology, or a reference to a menu item or window title. Consider using a monospaced or sans-serif font for this purpose instead, however.

P6. Avoid using capitals for emphasis—consider using italics or bold face instead.

Use of small capitals

P7. Consider using small capitals where capitals are required by convention.

By convention, capitals are used to designate model numbers, ASCII character names, Unicode character names, BBC BASIC keywords, programming language constants etc. as well as important passages of legal text. You may also consider using correct casing for legal text, perhaps adjusting the type size for emphasis of an important paragraph.

Heading capitalization (title casing)

P8. Consider capitalizing only those words which are important, and only those headings which are at the highest levels of importance.

Do not capitalize the second or third words in a compound word which is important to the heading, unless the subword is otherwise important.

The first word of a heading must always be capitalized unless it would violate another recommendation or rule. Otherwise, fewer capitals in less important headings is acceptable typesetting practice to assist readability.

(Here the term "capitalize" and its derivatives should be taken to imply title casing only, not the capitalization of all letters in a word. Indeed, this practice is discouraged by previous recommendations.)

Last updated: Sunday 25th July 2003