Re: Designing online help - book suggestions?

[jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com]

Hi Becca - I don't have any resources on online help per se, but I can 
point you to some good resources on online typography and basic web 
design.

One free resource is "The Elements of Typographic Style - Applied to 
the Web" (http://webtypography.net/), which provides some good pointers 
on typesetting for monitor output (and practical advice on 
implementation). A List Apart provides some great pointers in their 
articles on typography 
(http://www.alistapart.com/topics/topic/typography/). I'd also suggest 
looking at some articles from Smashing Magazine 
(http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/). A recent piece 
(http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/02/applying-macrotypography-for-readable-web-page/) 
provided a practical case-study in web typesetting.

As for your specific queries:
 - font-size will depend on the face. Verdana has particularly large 
glyphs;
   Arial rather narrow ones. Typical guidelines are to go no smaller 
than
   13px size, and define font-sizes in ems rather than absolute pixels, 
so
   users may resize the content in their browsers.
 - choose font-colour carefully. Anything lighter than #666666 grey on 
white
   will be too low-contrast. Stark blacks can look unprofessional; I'm 
a fan
   of setting body copy at #2b2b2b. YMMV.
 - your paper topics shouldn't be any longer than they need to be 
anyway.

Also, do be wary of the limitations of web typesetting. There are only 
a small number of websafe fonts that you may assume all users have. 
Whilst it is possible to embed other fonts in your webpage, you should 
speak to your system administrator to discuss the bandwidth 
implications.

Finally, do read up on CSS text formatting controls - you can kern, set 
leading and define granular font weights (for most fonts, at least) with 
simple style sheets.

HTH