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Kirsty Taylor produces <<... online documentation in HTML Help format, all
text is in Verdana font. At the moment, we use bold type for screen names
and screen elements. If there are words in the text that need to be
emphasised, bold + italic is used. Most of the style sources that I have
recommend *not* using italic on screen.>>
Bold is a poor choice for emphasis within running text because the page ends
up looking like it was created with a leaky fountain pen, and the visual
prominence of the boldfaced text draws the eyes. That's one reason why
italic type was invented: italic faces designed for legibility rather than
display differ just enough from the surrounding text to alert readers that a
word is being used differently, but not so much as to distract the eye.
(That's why it's been used in this way for more than a century in print
publishing.) Provided Verdana italic is legible, it should be a good choice
for emphasis.
I suspect that if you look closer, you'll see that your style guides say not
to set _large chunks of text_ in italic rather than forbidding individual
italicized words. That recommendation derives from legibility research that
shows italic type to be slightly less legible than Roman type, though I
suspect that as in most typography studies, the cause is lack of familiarity
(we read Roman type about 1000 times as often as italics) rather than any
inherent limitations in italic type.
<<The thoughts that we have come up with to avoid italics are either using a
different font (potentially ugly and "wrong" looking)>>
Different fonts can work very well if the fonts are compatible, so they send
the signal "this word is different" without being distracting, as is the
case with italics. But you must be sure your audience has the same font; if
not, they won't see the cue that the word is different. I tend to avoid
typographic distinctions for interface objects by means of two simple
conventions:
- Open the File menu: no need for any distinction for "File". Where you have
many two-word menu names, this approach is a bit dicier, but can still work
fine because the words preceding the word "menu" are clearly compound
modifiers that modify "menu".
- Click the "More details..." button: This approach addresses the problem
noted above about two-word names, but because multi-word buttons are more
common in my work than multi-word menus, there's more need to set them off
and clearly identify them as unit modifiers (think "compound adjectives").
Quotation marks are reasonably unintrusive because I don't have many
multiple-button combinations in a given instruction.
I have no usability data to support this, but my readers (clients, authors,
and peer reviewers) all seem perfectly happy with this approach. Given that
this is one of their rare opportunities to edit _me_ (rather than vice
versa), they're not at all reticent about picking nits with my writing, so I
take the lack of criticism as evidence that they like the convention.
<<... or colour (but there could be colour perception issues for users).>>
Color isn't the best choice, and it can become very visually distracting if
the difference is strong enough to serve the purpose. That's doubly true on
a Web page or other online text (e.g., help) in which color is already being
used for other purposes (a color for popups, plus two colors for links: one
for links followed, and one for links not followed)
If you do go with color, pick a color that has a strongly different "value"
(black content) from the body text; that means that even those who can't
perceive the color difference are likely to perceive the value difference. I
strongly suspect this is why most hyperlinks are underlined: because on the
face of it, the hyperlink text in most browsers I've used seems to have the
same value as the surrounding text, and thus, a second typographic cue is
necessary.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an
accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a
house"--Jules Henri Poincaré
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