2Sub-section headings,
in-text references and position titles

2.1Sub-section capitalization and levels

Sentence capitalization. For Marcomms and Engineering materials, we use sentence capitalization for headings, except for rare instances where all caps is used for design impact. The Opera Style Guide itself is a good example of this, as well as all materials on opera.com.

In sentence capitalization, only the first word and any proper nouns are capitalized. For example:

Configuring Opera browser settings

Sentence capitalization also implies that headings should be descriptive. They should be meaningful to those who may not intimately know the subject and clearly describe the content to follow.

For marcomm, periods may be used for headings. This is seen throughout the new opera.com design. However, within text, avoid using fragments as complete sentences unless necesssary to maintain tone or convey an idiom. Try to keep such instances to a minimum; otherwise, the impact of doing so is blunted.

Legal documentation. For Legal and Financial materials, casing should follow usual protocols for specific document types. For example, the Annual Report uses title casing, and contracts may use all caps.

For engineering–, legal– or financial–related documentation, do not use periods at the ends of headings. Likewise, incomplete sentences (for example, in bulleted lists) should not be punctuated with a period. Fragments should be avoided in paragraph text.

2.2References to other source material

Opera sticks very close to The Chicago Manual for in-text references to books or articles. The Manual leaves some room for interpreting when to use quatation marks or italics for styling titles of works. The following guidelines define what the Opera Style Guide prefers.

Quotation marks. For in-text references to other material, we use standard "quotation" marks for works of minor length or that are part of a collection, including: articles, short stories, webpages, and white papers.

These references are treated with headline-style capitalization. For example:

Strumpf's "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales" showed marked increases in mp3 music sales.

Material being published to the web may benefit from using the HTML character code " in place of quotation marks, as some browsers will render these marks poorly.

Italics. When mentioning materials that are of a significant length in body text, we use italics. This includes: books, court cases, magazines, newspapers, and style guides.

These references are treated with headline-style capitalization. For example:

Many editors use The Chicago Manual of Style.

2.3Position titles and person names

The Chicago Manual generally suggests that position titles are capitalized when they appear immediately before the person's name, and are normally set in lowercase when used in place of a name. This becomes problematic because it can be extremely confusing.

The Opera Style Guide simplifies this rule by requiring capitalization of all job titles, in any position in the sentence. For example:

Communications Director Pål Hvistendahl said, "Opera for CBM 64 was released today."

Or:

"Opera for CBM 64 was released today," says Nils Bjoström, Communications Director.

When a job title has additional departmental information included, use prepositions like "for" or "at" to avoid a chain of commas. For example:

"We are excited about our latest updates for the Opera Style Guide," says Susan Nichols, Team Manager for Documentation and Localization at Opera Software.

Abbreviated titles like CEO, CTO, and CFO are always capitalized.