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Vexy FontLab Writing Styleguide

How to write anything for Fontlab Ltd.: the manual, the landing page, the release note, the tooltip, and the translation of all four.

Start here

  • The guide is the law. Start with the overview, then choose a task. Read it before you write a release note.
  • The book is the reasoning: three volumes and eight prompt chapters, 36 chapters in total.
  • The glossary defines English terms; localization marks agreed terms and proposals.
  • Language guides cover 132 language and regional editions.
  • Global writing covers text that must work across languages and access needs.
  • Writing reference covers grammar, procedures, structure, punctuation, notation, and word usage.

The three registers

Marketing sells. Emotive by design, bound to what is true.

Technical instructs. Plain, exact, educational, with a strict budget for the one metaphor that keeps a manual awake.

Neutral informs. Objective but positive, for release notes and announcements, lifting into engagement a counted number of times and never in a limitations or pricing section.

If a piece contains numbered steps, it is technical, whatever else it is.

Choose a prompt

Use Neutral text to write or edit in the factual house voice. For deliberate mixtures of emotional appeal and precise explanation, use Write balanced text or Edit balanced text. Each chapter has standalone short and long variants.

Use Condense text into a TLDR for a literary summary at about 20% of the source length, with its perspective, humor, structure, and key identities intact.

Six rules you will hit immediately

  • You act. The app responds. Apps apply. Fonts have no agency.
  • FontLab is the product. Fontlab Ltd. is the company. The capital L difference is deliberate.
  • Sentence case everywhere, including H1 headings.
  • Prefer a colon to a dash.
  • Plain global English: most readers are not native speakers.
  • Name the app when a word is ambiguous. FontLab and Vexy both have Layers, Masks, Groups, Fills, Brush, Knife, Transform, Pencil, Eraser, and Scissors, and they mean different things.