Re: Font Question, Multi use document

["Bergen, Jane" <janeb -at- ANSWERSOFT -dot- COM>]

karen,

Palatino is not at all unsuitable for technical documents. We settled on
it a few years ago after looking at a lot of other technical documents.
It's easier to read than Times and looks good at smaller sizes. In our
documents, we use it at 10 points for body text. Most of our headings
are Arial.

For PDF, bear in mind that many--- if not most--- of your users will
want to print the pages. Sans serif is an extremely poor choice for long
lines of text as it's much harder for your readers to distinguish the
characters, and also, in most sand-serif fonts, the lower-case letter L
is almost indistinguishable from the number 1. Most any desktop
publishing text will tell you to stay away from a sans serif font, such
as Arial, for any printed materials. For regular online help, such as
.hlp files, it works because the lines are much shorter. PDF files,
however, tend to be read at full size and, as I mentioned, are often
printed.

Hope that helps.

Jane Bergen

> Forwarded question from Karen Farrell:
>
> I am designing a template for our training manuals and user guides.
> These documents will be hardcopy and PDF.
>
> I am trying to decide which font and point size to use. I was
> considering Palatino 12 pt., which looks good on paper and is readable
> online. However, I've heard that Palatino is not suitable for
> technical