10 pt vs 12 pt

["Wright, Lynne" <lwright -at- positron911 -dot- com>]

Just my 2 cents on Jon Posada's string: 

I worked as a typesetter for about a decade, and all the publication
designers I worked with pretty much universally used 10pt text for
newsletters, magazines, annual reports, whatever. They may have gone to 9 or
11 pt, depending on the font, but only if the end result was that the type
looked the same size as Times 10pt. 

Where I am now, we happen to use 10pt Times for our docs, and even though
i'm a myopic 44 yr old who's starting to have trouble reading small print, I
find our docs to be completely and easily legible. 

I always found that using anything larger made the text look like it was
from a grade 1 primer... and when you can't fit as many characters on each
line, it changes the line breaks. So particularly if your hyphenation is
turned off, it can result in an overly ragged right margin (contains too
many too-short lines). 

I'd probably use 11 or 12 pt type for on-line help or web page text, but not
in a manual. 

Lynne Wright
Technical Communications
Positron Inc.
5101 Buchan St.  H4P 2R9
(514) 345-2200 ext. 2533
fax:   345-2272



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