Dictionary style guide

A few of us have put our heads together and come up with a style guide for formatting DDLm dictionaries. The original motivation was to standardise on a text layout so that dictionary change diffs did not include irrelevant whitespace, changes in capitalisation and so forth that might occur when dictionaries are updated via ingesting into software, adding something, then outputting again. I am aware of the concept of pretty-printers, but in the long term these tend to become obsolete unless maintained.

This guide is only likely to be of interest if you work with software that outputs DDLm dictionaries. And I stress this is purely a style guide, and has no implications for CIF syntax, although you could of course format CIF data files also according to this guide. I'm not sure what the point of that would be, though.

The style guide can be read at: http://comcifs.github.io/draft/ddlm_dictionary_style_guide

The ddlm reference dictionary formatted according to this guide (as near as I can tell, might be a few whitespace errors still lurking in the loops) is at https://github.com/COMCIFS/cif_core/blob/reformatted/ddl.dic

Any feedback or contributions are welcome. I plan to integrate a linter into the github workflow for dictionaries that would check against this guide.

all the best,

James.
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