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Bolding text is a total pain to maintain and, with appropriate subject
headings and subheadings should be unnecessary. It is also extremely
time-consuming to create and to review.
Bold topic heads should suffice quite nicely. If your text needs
particular parts only bolded, I would suggest you have too much text.
Or, if you really want to be able to "scan for the needed items
quickly" you should consider using the Information Mapping style. For
this purpose in procedural docs, it is (possibly) unsurpassed.
David
>
> But here's an experiment to try. Take a printout of a procedure where
> the UI items that the user would act upon are in bold, the button names,
> the field names, etc. Run it through a copy machine. Take the copy and
> run that through the copy machine. Take that copy and run it through the
> copy machine. Repeat a few more times until the body text is faded and
> fuzzy enough to be unreadable. Then see if you (or someone else) can
> figure out what to do by using just the bolded (although probably
> somewhat fuzzy themselves) terms.
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