Tuesday, October 1, 2019

abbreviations - Capitalization after '3D'



I'm translating for a company that creates specialized 3D software. In a lot of the brochures, there are bullet points for things like '3D road design.' or '3D visibility.' To my eye, the words 'road' and 'visibility' should be capitalized in these contexts.



To be clear, I'm asking about the cases in which 3D begins a sentence, and whether I should capitalize the word that comes after it.



Am I right? Is this basically on a how-you-like-it basis?



Additional question (really just curiosity): when I search for questions like this, is 3D an abbreviation or an acronym? I feel like it would technically be an abbreviation of an acronym?


Answer




Consider the following two sentences:



3D visibility is needed for best response times.



3D Visibility is needed for best response times.



In my opinion, the 1st statement is talking generally about visibility in 3D, whereas the 2nd statement seems to refer to a product (e.g. software?) called 3D Visibility.



I agree with Edwin that the rule for capitalising a sentence is that only the first word needs to be capitalised; but since numeric digits have no uppercase version, no capitalisation is required.


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