On tis, 2009-11-10 at 14:10 -0800, Richard Broersma wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> > Well, a lot of hard work. ;-) Just like there are coding standards and
> > best practices, there are standards and customs in writing and
> > publishing.
>
> Are these published anywhere?
Um, well, that's like asking, how can I write good programs. ;-)
Off the top of my head, some sources I have found useful over the years:
* FreeBSD Documentation Project <http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/>
* GNU Coding Standards, section Documentation
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Documentation>
* man-pages(7), which I adapted into our own style guide:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/docguide-style.html
* The Elements of Style
* The Chicago Manual of Style
* Various publishers I have worked with over the years have the own
style guidelines.
Also, just like open-source projects adopt certain practices that make
the code more suitable for collaborative development, similar practices
can be found for collaborative documentation writing, e.g., version
control, frequent rebuilds and tests, consistent interfaces, robust
tools, etc.