• Writing style
  • Consistency
  • Grammatical tenses
  • Paragraphing
  • Titles and headings
• Document’s structure
• Images
  • Screenshots
  • Media files
  • ALT tags

Edit on GitHub

To give the community the best documentation possible, we listed here a few guidelines, tips and tricks that will make your content shine at its brightest! While we encourage you to adopt your own writing style, some rules still apply to give the reader more clarity and comprehension.

Note

We strongly recommend contributors to carefully read the other documents in this Contribution section of the documentation. Good knowledge of the ins and outs of RST writing is required to write and submit your contribution. Note that it also affects your writing style itself.

• Introduction guide
• RST cheat sheet
• RST guidelines

Writing style

Writing for documentation isn’t the same as writing for a blog or another medium. Readers are more likely to skim read until they’ve found the information they are looking for. Keep in mind that the user documentation is a place to inform and describe, not to convince and promote.

Consistency

Consistency is key to everything.

Make sure that your writing style remains consistent. If you modify an existing text, try to match the existing tone and presentation, or rewrite it to match your own style.

Grammatical tenses

In English, descriptions and instructions require the use of a Present Tense, while a future tense is appropriate only when a specific event is to happen ulteriorly. This logic might be different in other languages.

• Good example (present):

  Screenshots are automatically resized to fit the content block’s width.
• Bad example (future):

  When you take a screenshot, remember that it will be automatically resized to fit the content block’s width.

Paragraphing

A paragraph comprises several sentences that are linked by a shared idea. They usually are two to six lines long.

In English, a new idea implies a new paragraph, rather than having a line break as it is common to do in some other languages. Line breaks are useful for layout purposes but shouldn’t be used as a grammatical way of separating ideas.

See also

• RST cheat sheet: Break the line but not the paragraph

Titles and headings

To write good titles and headings:

• Be concise.
• Avoid sentences, questions, and titles starting with “how to.”
• Don’t use pronouns in your titles, especially 2nd person (your)

• Use sentence case. This means you capitalize only:

  • the first word of the title or heading
  • the first word after a colon
  • proper nouns (brands, product and service names, etc.)
  • app features, as written in the apps

  Important

  Do not capitalize common nouns when they are not referred to as features. This is more likely to happen in headings rather than in titles.

  	Examples	Explanations
  Titles (h1)	Quotation Templates	“Quotation Templates” is a feature in Odoo.
  	Lead Mining	“Lead Mining” is a feature in Odoo.
  	Resupply from another Warehouse	“Warehouse” is capitalized as we refer to the feature in the app rather than to a real warehouse.
  	Synchronize Google Calendar with Odoo	“Google Calendar” is a product and “Odoo” is a brand.
  Headings (h2, h3, etc.)	Confirm the quotation	“The quotation” is a common noun not referring to a feature in Odoo.
  	Test environment	“Environment” is a common noun.
  	Add a new Payment Acquirer	“Payment Acquirers” is a feature in Odoo.
  	Generate SEPA Direct Debit XML files to submit payments	“SEPA Direct Debit” and “XML” are considered as proper nouns.

Document’s structure

Use different headings levels to organize your text by sections and sub-sections. Your headings are also displayed in a dynamic navigation bar on the side.

H1: Page title Your page title gives your reader a quick and clear understanding of what your content is about. It is also referenced in the section’s table of contents. The content in this section describes the upcoming content from a business point of view, and shouldn’t put the emphasis on Odoo, as this is documentation and not marketing. Start first with a lead paragraph, which helps the reader make sure that they’ve found the right page, then explain the business aspects of this topic in the following paragraphs.
	H2: Section title (configuration) This first H2 section is about the configuration of the feature, or the prerequisites to achieve a specific goal. To add a path, make sure you use the :menuselection: specialized directive (see link below). Example: To do so, go to :menuselection:`App name --> Menu --> Sub-menu`, and enable the XYZ feature.
	H2: Section title (main sections) Create as many main sections as you have actions or features to distinguish. The title can start with a verb, but try to avoid using “Create …”.
		H3: Subsection Subsections are perfect for assessing very specific points. The title can be in the form of a question, if appropriate.
	H2: Next Section

See also

• RST cheat sheet: headings
• RST cheat sheet: specialized directives

Images

Adding a few images to illustrate your text helps the readers to understand and memorize your content. However, avoid adding too many images: it isn’t necessary to illustrate all steps and features, and it may overload your page.

Important

Don’t forget to compress your PNG files with pngquant.

Screenshots

Screenshots are automatically resized to fit the content block’s width. This implies that screenshots can’t be too wide, else they would appear very small on-screen. Therefore, we recommend to avoid to take screenshots of a full screen display of the app, unless it is relevant to do so.

A few tips to improve your screenshots:

1. Zoom in your browser. We recommend a 110% zoom for better results.
2. Resize your browser’s width, either by resizing the window itself or by opening the browser’s developer tools (press the F12 key) and resizing the width.
3. Select the relevant area, rather than keeping the full window.
4. If necessary, you can edit the screenshot to remove unnecessary fields and to narrow even more Odoo’s display.

Note

Resizing the window’s width is the most important step to do as Odoo’s responsive design automatically resizes all fields to match the window’s width.

Media files

A media filename:

• is written in lower-case letters
• is relevant to the media’s content. (E.g., screenshot-tips.gif.)
• separates its words with a hyphen - (E.g., awesome-filename.png.)

Each document has its own folder in which the media files are located. The folder’s name must be the same as the document’s filename.

For example, the document doc_filename.rst refers to two images that are placed in the folder doc_filename.

├── section
│   └── doc_filename
│   │   └── screenshot-tips.gif
│   │   └── awesome-filename.png
│   └── doc_filename.rst

Note

Previously, image filenames would mostly be named with numbers (e.g., feature01.png) and placed in a single media folder. While it is advised not to name your new images in that fashion, it is also essential not to rename unchanged files, as doing this would double the weight of renamed image files on the repository. They will eventually all be replaced as the content referencing those images is updated.

ALT tags

An ALT tag is a text alternative to an image. This text is displayed if the browser fails to render the image. It is also helpful for users who are visually impaired. Finally, it helps search engines, such as Google, to understand what the image is about and index it correctly, which improves the SEO significantly.

Good ALT tags are:

• Short (one line maximum)
• Not a repetition of a previous sentence or title
• A good description of the action happening on the image
• Easily understandable if read aloud

See also

• RST cheat sheet: image directive