The WROCC Style Guide
The following summary covers some of the conventions used in articles for The WROCC.
Numbers and units
Numbers of twelve and less are written in full, unless it is more appropriate to present them in numerical form.
Dates are given in the form 20th January; times in the form 12.34pm.
Units are written following the number, with no space. Standard units are B, KB, MB, GB, TB for bytes, b, Kb, Mb, Gb for bits, b/s for bits per second.
Screen resolutions are presented in the form 1360 × 768.
Style usage
Star commands are written inline in bold font – such as *IconSprites – with camel-case as required.
The titles of books and magazines are written in italic font – for example, Acorn User or Programmer’s Reference Manual.
Section headings are given with an initial capital, unless later words require capitalisation.
Back references
We usually reference back-issues of the newsletter as “issue 41.2 of The WROCC” unless space is at a premium.
Computer and product names
Acorn and RISC OS computers are referred to as follows: Atom, BBC Micro, Electron, BBC Master, Archimedes, RiscPC, Iyonix, A9home, ARMini, ARMiniX, ARMbook, ARMX6, Beagleboard, Compute Module 4 (or CM4), Hydra, IGEPv5, IO Board, i.MX6, Omega, Pandaboard, PandaRo, Pinebook, Pinebook Pro, RapidO Ig, RapidO Ti, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2 (or Pi 2), RISCBook, RISCBook Go!, RockyRAID, SideKick, Titan, Titanium, TiMachine, Tix Duet, 4té, 4té², 4tissimo!.
Generic platform groups are: ARMv5, ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8, OMAP3, OMAP4, OMAP5, 26-bit, 32-bit.
Processors are: Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15.
Other associated hardware is: Pi-Top, WiFi, PiFi.
The emulators are: ArcEm, RPCEmu and Virtual Acorn.
Filenames are: drawfile, JPEG, Obey file, sprite, spritefile.
Parts of the desktop: desktop, Filer, iconbar, Pinboard, pop-up menu.
Filing systems include: ADFS, DOSFS, Fat32FS, HostFS, NVFS, NVMEFS, RAMFS, SCSIFS, SDFS – and, of course, Filecore.
Key names are capitalised, as are mouse buttons: Shift, Ctrl, Return, Escape, Select, Menu, Adjust.
Applications do not have the ! included in their name, with the exception of !Store if referred to in this form (but PlingStore is preferred).
Software and product names are: ArtWorks, BBC BASIC, CLFiler, Gmail, Impression II, Impression, Impression-X, JavaScript, Messenger Pro, NetSurf, Otter Browser, Ovation Pro, Pinboard 2, PlingStore, PostScript, QupZilla, RISC OS, RISC OS FAST, RiscOSM, WebKit.
Names of standards are: CD-ROM, DVD+R, DVD-R (that’s hyphen, not minus), DVD+RW, DVD-RW, eMMC, Ethernet, HDMI, Mini HDMI, M.2, MIDI, NVM Express (NVMe), PCI, PCI Express (or PCIe), S/PDIF, RS-232, SD card, Micro SD card, SSD, Unicode, USB, USB 2, USB 3, USB C, Mini USB, Micro USB.
Other proper nouns
The following words which often appear in articles relating to computers or RISC OS are: Bezier curve, Boolean.
However, in line with established use by more august organisations, the following proper nouns are not capitalised: internet.
Publication names include: Acorn User, Archive, BEEBUG, Drag ’n Drop, GAG News, The Micro User, Risc User.
Company names include: Beebug, CJE Micro’s, Cloverleaf, DoggySoft, eBay, MW Software, R-Comp, R-Comp Interactive, RISCOS Ltd (or ROL), RISCOSbits, RISC OS Developments (or ROD), RISC OS Open (or ROOL).
Other standard words include: email, postcode, Covid-19
