What style guides are there for technical documentation?

Here are some examples from the computer industry, all available at no charge:

• Apple Style Guide: https://books.apple.com/us/book/apple-style-guide/id11618552...

• Google Developer Documentation Style Guide: https://developers.google.com/style/

• Microsoft Writing Style Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/

I’ve found earlier editions of Microsoft’s guide to be helpful when writing about user interfaces on the Windows platform.

Other industries have their own conventions. For example, the maintenance manuals for commercial airplanes are often written in Simplified Technical English (http://asd-ste100.org/), and the Securities and Exchange Commission has published a Plain English Handbook (https://www.sec.gov/pdf/handbook.pdf).

There are many other style guides; some are listed on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides

Your team or organization may also need to develop its own style guide, to standardize the names of your products, features, concepts, user interface elements, and so on.

I have the same question, I'm writing a whitepaper (a useful one, with how-to steps things and supporting code), and I cast about looking for a style guide and format for "whitepaper". Imagine my surprise when I found a site from someone who calls himself "the whitepaper guy" -- he writes whitepapers for hire, for anyone, any business. I'm made to realize it's marketing under a veneer of tech information exchange.

What amounts to genuine tech exchange these days, as it appears to me, are mostly PowerPoint presentations at conferences. The formal docs are man pages, and probably RFCs, the informal docs are some guy's blog or a single blog page. The project's README.md are helpful as well but they conform to the individual and not any style. Serious tech papers conform to scientific and research publication style, and even then style guide has more to do with citations. There's nothing standard and easy to reach for in the business-technology intersection.

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.

See also [0] which was discussed here on HN [1]

[0] https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289832

I think one should ask who the audience of the technical documentation is.

Is it the practitioners who will use the technology in the wild? Or do you want to sell your technology to the CTOs and technology scouts? A whole different format and content might be chosen in case you would like to receive a thorough feedback and review of your technology (RFC).