A Style Guide for Ethiopic Layout

Greetings All,

Firstly, I hope everyone is safe and well during this challenging time and
will pull through it intact and with a renewed appreciation of the gift
that is life.

An update is long overdue here, and I've nearly sent one a dozen times
over, my apologies for not succeeding. In the previous update I reported
that a survey was to be translated and then circulated for expert input.
What we learned from two translators that we worked with was that the text
was too difficult to translate clearly, and wouldn't make sense if
translated.  Any translation would still be confusing to the reader.

Instead of surveying to answer a shopping list of questions, they suggested
another approach that would lead to a result that would be more easily
understood and would garner better feedback.  The recommendation was to
write a style guide and then have experts react to it and make suggestions
and corrections.  The view was that it is better to state rules, rather
than ask what rules should be, as was the approach in the survey form.

To this end a style guide was initiated that covered the same topics as the
survey.  By "style guide" I refer to a writer's style guide such as the
MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style to name a few.  However, with the
reduced scope that the style guide would only cover formatting and layout
topics that software would be expected to automate.  The style guide would
*not* cover how to write good prose and give guidance on grammar.

The survey effort then took the direction of producing a basic style guide
to bring to the Ethiopian Writers Association to present to their members
for feedback.  The development of the style guide is ongoing and can be
reviewed here: https://w3c.github.io/elreq/style-guide/  It is largely
modeled after the Chicago Manual of Style, simply for its good inventory of
formatting topics.  The recommendations in the draft style guide offer what
would be a likely candidate for a best practice from amongst known
variations in practices.  Sometimes a section simply presents a "best
guess" when there is no clear basis to recommend one approach over
another.  It is expected that expert stakeholders would correct any guess
that is in error.

I'll end here. Again my apologies for the long break in communications.

-Daniel