STSstyle

STSstyle is a formal style guide and typographic system developed for the STS community to standardize writing, formatting, and presentation across documentation, software, and scholarly outputs associated with STS projects. It defines conventions for language, typography, units, citations, figures and tables, and data presentation, with the aim of improving clarity, consistency, and accessibility.

Origins of STSstyle trace to a collaborative effort by the STS Editorial Council in the 2010s. It is maintained in a public repository and released under an open license to encourage community contributions. The guide covers technical documents, API references, manuals, articles, and web content, and provides language and localization provisions for non-English materials.

Its key features include a serial comma usage rule, consistent capitalization and naming conventions for project terms, guidance on SI units and numeric formatting, a structured approach to citations and bibliographies, and rules for figures, tables, equations, and code blocks. It also includes accessibility requirements such as descriptive captions and alt text to aid readers with disabilities.

STSstyle provides templates for documents in Markdown, reStructuredText, and LaTeX, plus CSS and styling guidelines for web pages. It is supported by a lightweight linting workflow and formal release notes for each version.

Governance is maintained by the STS Style Board, with contributions submitted via version-controlled repositories and subject to peer review. Adoption within the STS community is broad, though debates persist on certain linguistic choices and localization details. STSstyle aims to balance consistency with flexibility across diverse STS disciplines and languages.