What is best way to show submenus in a document?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Jim Schoen wonders: <<We have a disagreement in our company about how to
show submenus.  Is there a standard that applies. For example, if I were
writing a document for Microsoft word and wanted to demonstrate how to
insert a picture.
Insert>Picture>Clip Art
Is the ">" a standard way to separate these menu options?>>

There are darn few standards in techwhirling, and showing submenus isn't
among them. What we do have is a variety of _preferences_ espoused by
various style guides, with no research available that I'm aware of to
suggest any one approach is best. The problem with using the > symbol is
that it's not intuitive to everyone; I've met enough people who didn't
understand it (e.g., in some of my posts to techwr-l or copyediting-l many
years back) that I'm convinced this approach needs to be defined if you're
going to use it. As a simple visual shorthand, it works perfectly well for
me and probably for most techwhirlers; the question is whether your audience
would recognize it without coaching. The safer (more conservative) approach
is generally some variant of "Open the X menu, select Y, then select Z".

<<If the menu options have a hard key (an underlined option), should the
documentation display the character as underlined. (In this case, should the
"I" in insert, the "P" in Picture, and the "C" in Clip Art be underlined in
a hard copy documentation.>>

I'm an advocate of making the textual representation match the screen
representation as closely as possible, but only when I can convince myself
that doing so provides important information. Thus, underlining the
characters in a screenshot is important because it represents what the users
actually see on the screen, but in running text, the underline probably adds
little or no useful information and only makes the text harder to read. (And
to write, which is an important consideration if you've got to write a lot
of these lines and the developers might be changing the menu shortcuts.)

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is
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accidents."-- Nathaniel Borenstein

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