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Formatting & Style Guide

Scope and purpose

This document provides formatting and style conventions for publishing documents in GitHub in Markdown format. Some advice on document conversion and how to meet more sophisticated publishing needs is offered.

General

  • Use GitHub Flavored Markdown.
  • Example document following this guide: ExampleMarkdownDocument.md.
  • Documents should not define their own general-purpose X-Road terms or abbreviations list but rather use reference to X-Road terms document (Terms of X-Road).
    • Terms or abbreviations list should be moved from the existing documents to X-Road terms document.
    • Add any new general-purpose X-Road terms and abbreviations to X-Road terms document if noticed missing one.
    • Exception: terms and abbreviations that are related only to the document in question and are not useful in any other context (document), can be defined solely in the document itself to make reading easier.

Title & headings

  • Use # (h1) for document title.
  • Use ## (h2) for top-level headings.
  • Number the headings manually. There's no heading numbering support in Markdown.

Version history

  • Markdown document should include version history table.
  • Version history table is describing what changes have been made to document.
  • Newest (latest) change comment is at the bottom of table (oldest is on the top of table).
  • Version history table is positioned after the document name and ID fields and before the table of contents.

Table of contents

  • Provide table of contents for longer documents.

  • Use links in the table of contents. Use GitHub heading anchors. For example the following code links to this section:

    [Table of contents](#table-of-contents)

  • Table of contents can be generated using a appropriate tool, for example, https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdown-toc or vim-markdown-toc.

License

  • Use Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

  • Create separate chapter for license and add the following license text to this chapter:

    This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

  • License chapter must be the very first chapter in markdown document (first one after the table of contents).

Linking

  • Use relative linking to link to image files and other documents in the same repository.

  • Use anchors to create references:

    <a id="Ref_RFC2119"></a>\[RFC2119\] Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels,
Internet Engineering Task Force, 1997.

  • When linking or referencing X-Road documents use document abbreviation:

    [\[ARC-G\] X-Road Architecture](Architecture/arc-g_x-road_arhitecture.md)

Code

  • Use backticks to mark inline code, URLs a.o. constant values.
  • Use GitHub Markdown code fencing to format blocks of code.

Tables

  • Use GitHub Flavored Markdown features.

Conversion

  • Use programmer's editor (e.g. Sublime Text), or just Notepad to convert documents from Word, Confluence, PDF a.o. formats to Markdown.
  • Specialized converter software (e.g. Pandoc) can be used, but will rarely justify the learning effort.

Drawing tool

  • Use draw.io to create drawings, flowcharts and pictures for X-Road documentation. Draw.io (https://www.draw.io/) is completely free online diagram editor. It can be also used in offline mode by going to the following URL into your web browser: https://www.draw.io/app or by using Chrome Application.
  • Use PNG file format in documents and save the original source file as native XML. Both files must be committed into Github to "img" sub-folder of the document.

For more sophisticated publishing

  • For more sophisticated presentation needs, consider using Hugo, Jekyll or some other website generation tool that accepts Markdown.

References

GitHub Mastering Markdown