Spelling and Punctuation

Follow US English spelling and punctuation rules.

If in doubt about spelling, refer to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

For punctuation, use double quotes and punctuation marks inside the quotes. For instance:

This is known as “VNF.”

Footnotes Punctuation

Treat the footnote reference number as if it were a closing quote: place it outside a comma or period if any of these are present. Example:

... has achieved a 95% success rate.²

Hyphenation

Hyphenate compound adjectives, such as: “High-Availability clusters,” “multi-user environment,” etc. Don’t hyphenate compound nouns, e.g. “If you require high availability, then…”

Examples of hyphenated terms:

• Front-end
• bare-metal if used as an adjective (e.g. “on bare-metal hosts”)
• on-premises if used as an adjective (e.g. “an on-premises deployment”)

Text Styles: Bold, Italic

If you want to emphasize a feature, GUI element or component name use bold text. Examples:

Using the Sunstone Web UI, you can...

In the left-hand pane, select Storage, then Datastores.

For compound left menu navigation, use a breadcrumb style list with -> in between each section, all in bold. Example:

In Sunstone, go to **Instances -> Virtual Routers**

If instead you want to emphasize a concept or key point, use italics (like in this sentence and in the example below):

Check the private IP of the VR.

When referencing literals such as names of files, variables etc. include them in the code format, as is already done in the existing OpenNebula docs. Examples:

To check the state of the VMs, run onevm list. In the file /etc/one/oned.conf, find the FEDERATION section...

Numbers

Numbers 10,000 and above: Mark thousands with a comma.

Numbers 9999 and below: Don’t mark thousands.

Examples:

• 1250
• 5700
• 9999
• 10,000
• 20,000

If the number is less than 10, type it in letters.

Exceptions:

• Technical quantities, e.g. 8GB

• Numbers in technical contexts:

  • Parameters
  • Whole or part of an IP (e.g. “in the range 172.20.0.2 to .8”)
  • When the number is part of a UI item, such as part of a menu name, a label, a drop-down menu item, etc.
  • Sections of documents such as chapters or steps (e.g. “Step 4”)

• Version numbers

• Percentages

• If the number occurs in a sentence that lists other numbers of the same item, and one of those other numbers is greater than 10. For example:

  “They managed eight separate clouds of varying complexity: two had 4 VMs, three had 7 VMs, and one had 14 VMs.”

  The above example contains two categories of items: clouds and VMs. Since all the clouds total less than 10, their counts are enumerated in letters. But one of the VM counts totals more than 10, so all the VM counts are written in numbers.

• If a sentence begins with a number, type the number in letters even if it’s more than 10.

Special Characters

Use HTML entities:

• Copyright © - ©
• Registered ® - ®
• Trademark ™ - ™