Clip art for keyboard symbols

["Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Suzette Seveny wondered about the existence of clip art for various
keyboard symbols. There's tons of this available, both commercially
produced (from Adobe and Corel) and in the public domain, but mostly
it's in the form of Truetype or Postscript fonts rather than clip art
per se. The question I'd ask before proceeding, though, is what your
goal is. On the initial "typographic conventions" page of a manual,
this sort of clip art makes very good sense indeed, particularly for
new users:

[Del] = The delete key on your keyboard. In the text, we'll just say
"Delete key" from now on.

Within the main body of the text itself, I don't think that using the
symbols instead of the words is all that useful for any audience
other than children (who often need visual cues to help them get past
any reading difficulties) or the rankest of beginners (who may
require a less intimidating approach than burying the word for the
key within a long sentence of forbidding prose). I don't recall the
last time I saw documentation that used the actual keyboard pictures
outside this context, and there's a good reason for it: the page ends
up looking like someone spilled a tray of Letraset letters atop a
randomly arranged collection of keycap icons. That is, the icons
stand out so much from the background text that they're distracting.
I'm not aware that anyone has "proved" that judicious use of the key
symbols interferes with reading, but anecdotal evidence certainly
suggests that this is the case, particularly if you overuse the
technique.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it
means."--Inigo Montoya