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Re:Ask HN: What style guides are there for technical documen... by giantg2 on Friday May 29, 2020 @10:53AM (#23350604)
This varies from company to company for the most part. You have some standardized formats such as business process maps and use-case diagrams. I can't remember the name of the free tool we used in my BPM class, but there are tools out there that follow a standard.

My recommendation is to find documentation for an existing system that you find helpful and easy to understand, then use that as an outline for creating your documentation.

Re:Ask HN: What style guides are there for technical documen... by minnca on Friday May 29, 2020 @11:19AM (#23350945)
I've also found that it's more useful to use a good doc as an outline for your own documentation than to start from scratch + style guide. Using a good doc as a guide can help you develop your own documentation style – you can figure out what works and doesn't work for you.

Style guides can be great in the right context, but I think focusing on them too much can take away from the most important part of documentation – the content.

Re:Ask HN: What style guides are there for technical documen... by minnca on Friday May 29, 2020 @11:20AM (#23350976)
That being said, Microsoft and Google have decent, publicly-available tech writing style guides: -Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/acronyms -Google: https://developers.google.com/style