Re: Typographical treatment of GUI components
One exception being that we don't give GUI
components (commands on menus and buttons, window and dialog
box titles, etc.) any special typographic treatment. In
other words, no bolding. We do replicate the spelling and
casing of these components.
Years ago, we decided that the extra work required didn't
create a proportional value. We also felt that the resulting
text looked blotchy and was less readable.
In manuals, there needs to be a way to differnetiate interface elements from normal text. (In English, you can sometimes get away with not differentiating them because of their uppercase initials. This does not work in most other languages, however.)
There are two basic techniques of marking interface elements:
- quotes
- typographic convention
We've looked into both and found that - at least for our texts, which tend to be heavy on interface elements - quoting each one gave the text a broken appearence and seemd to make reading it harder.
The same goes for bolding them, because bold text is usually looked at first. Again, readability appeared to suffer. (I'm saying 'appeared' because we did no formal tests but relied solely on our own impression.)
We finally settled on making the elements italic. Italic has the advantage of having the same 'grayness' as the standard (roman) text, or at least a very similar one. This means that the text looks less broken and is easier to read, while the interface elements are still clearly marked.
Small caps might offer similar advantages.
Regards
Jan Henning
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Jan Henning
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
Phone: +49 700 0200 0700, Fax: +49 8179 9307-12
E-Mail: henning -at- r-l -dot- de, Web: www.r-l.de
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References:
Typographical treatment of GUI components: From: David Chinell
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