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Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Suggestions and guidelines for using LibGuides to best effect in the UCLA Library.

Formatting Your Text

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Library Style Guide

The Library has a Website Style Guide that's chock-ful of useful information on proper formatting for names, numbers, times, etc. Read it. Use it.

If you have a style question that isn't answered by the Style Guide, then turn to the Chicago Manual of Style.

There is one easy rule to remember when selecting the fonts, colors, and font sizes for the text in your LibGuides: Don't do it!

Those details, along with margins, indenting, justification, paragraph spacing, and all the other little things you can do to text, are all controlled by the Library's style sheets. So if you don't specify those things, they'll default to exactly what they're supposed to be.

There are only four things you may use to vary text within a LibGuide:

Bold

Italics

  • Bulleted Lists

Headers

If you want to use sub-headers within a box, use Heading 3 (H3). Heading 1 is used for the page title, and Heading 2 is used for the box titles. Headers introducing lists should not end in colons.

Notes

  • The Chicago Manual of Style suggests using italics for emphasis rather than boldface. Never use all caps!
  • One exception that's common in web writing: Use boldface to highlight key words, phrases, or terms that users need to find easily within the text. They're "index points" that allow users to home in on the information they need.
  • Underlines should also be avoided, except when required by a citation style. On the web, underlining is commonly used to indicate that something is a link, so using it for other purposes can be confusing.
  • Every box already has a title, so don't use the h3 tag to add another one. If your box needs to begin with a sub-heading, change the opening tag to <h3 class="top-head"> (in the source code) to eliminate the extra line-spacing normally given to headers.

It's also important to note that allowing style sheets to control formatting is an important accessibility feature. It allows users to consistently apply special font options for various visual impairment problems. Using inline style definitions (either by manually creating them or by copying from Word) can confuse or block that functionality.

Ampersands

The Library's Editorial Style Guide for print forbids the use of ampersands. The new Website Style Guide allows them, but only in headings. We thus have a lot of mixed usage. Here are some more specific guidelines for use in LibGuides that should help clear it up:

  • Always use ampersands in
    • table headings
    • LibGuides subject headings
  • You may use ampersands in the following places, but only when necessary to fit the content onto one line. And once you do use it in one page or box, continue using it in the rest of that guide for consistency.
    • page/tab titles
    • box tittles
    • paragraph/section headings inside boxes
  • Never use ampersands in
    • guide titles
    • regular body text
    • full sentences (even if they're in a heading or title)
  • Proper nouns (names of organizations, course titles, book/serial titles) should use whatever form is used in the original. This overrides any of the above rules.

Side note: The serial comma, which is part of the Library style, is deleted before ampersands. Note also that in titles that list items, you can often just use commas, for example, a page called Journals, Magazines, Newspapers.

Microsoft Word: With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

Microsoft software often tries to be user-friendly and anticipate your needs. Sometimes this is good—like a friendly, experienced waiter who knows just what to get you before you even ask for it. Other times it's not so good—like a big, friendly dog that can't wait to jump all over your guests, cover them with slobber, and knock the furniture over with its tail. When it comes to html, Microsoft Word is the big, clumsy dog.

When you copy and paste text from Microsoft Word into an html editor (like the LibGuides Rich Text Editor), Word assumes that you want the text at the destination to look exactly like the text in your Word document. And so Word throws in tons of highly detailed html codes to control the colors, fonts, line heights, justification, etc. All the stuff we explicitly don't want you to specify so that the style sheets can handle it.

Fortunately, LibGuides anticipated this! There is a special icon near the end of the control bar in the Rich Text Editor: "Paste from Word." Paste from Word will cut out most of the junk formatting but leave simple stuff like bold, italics, and links. If you want to get rird of everything, choose "Paste as plain text." Even if you've already copied offending Word code into your boxes, there's another button a few to the left of that which is "Remove format." It will strip away everything (including bold and italics) except links.

In general, it's a good idea to use Paste from Word if you're copying text from almost any program other than Notepad. Even copying text from other LibGuides pages within your browser can cause unwanted format codes. For example, the IE copy function tries to replicate the color of the links, but actually gets the color wrong, so you'll end up with links in a different shade of blue than what's specified by the style sheets! Your links should like this, not like this.

Using Tables in Boxes

Because LibGuides content is already presented in boxes, tables inside them don't really look good, so you should try to avoid them. However, there are times when you really need a table. To use the "official" Library table style, don't specify any colors in the table formatting. Set the border width to 1 and be sure to use th tags for header cells. Below is a table you can use as a template.

Column 1
Row 1		 Column 2 Column 3
Row 2 some text some text
Row 3 some text some text
Row 4 some text some text