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Serenity Operating System
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Andreas Kling Documentation: Add HIG document about writing UI text
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Guidelines for user interface text in SerenityOS#

Capitalization#

SerenityOS employs two capitalization styles:

  • Book title capitalization
  • Sentence-style capitalization

Book title capitalization#

In this style, we capitalize the first letter of the first and last word, as well as all words in between, except articles (a, an, the); the seven coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so); and prepositions with up to four letters (at, by, for, with, into, ...)

Examples:#

  • Create New Layer
  • Copy URL
  • Move to Front
  • Save and Exit
  • Sort by Name

Used for:#

  • Button text
  • Icon labels
  • Menu names
  • Menu items
  • Tab titles
  • Window titles
  • Tooltips

Sentence-style capitalization#

This style follows basic English sentence capitalization. We capitalize the first letter of the first word, along with the first letter of proper names, weekdays, etc.

Examples:#

  • An error occurred
  • Use system defaults
  • Copy the selected text
  • Enable Linux compatibility hacks

Used for:#

  • Check box labels
  • Group box labels
  • List items
  • Messages (as in message boxes)
  • Radio button labels
  • Status bar text
  • Text box labels