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Dick Margulis responded to my comments: <<You have learned well,
Grasshopper. However, you answered the wrong question. Everything that you
said--including the material I snipped for length--was well put and well
reasoned. For print.>>
Does that make you the blind teacher who can't keep ahold of his marbles?
<gdrlhwswhwh*> The same rules for legibility and emphasis apply equally
online and in print, with only minor differences in the details. More to the
point, the answers I gave were predicated on my approach to online help in
WinHelp, which is HTML Help's less-evil twin. <g> So I figure my advice is
still pretty much applicable.
* Grin, duck, and run like hell while shouting "woo hoo, woo hoo"! (Think
Daffy Duck after twitting Elmer Fudd.)
<<What I tell our developers (for a Web application) and what I practice on
our Web site is this: for text (as opposed to graphics, where anything
goes), the only appropriate HTML font specification (in a style sheet, of
course) is "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif.">>
That's a pretty sensible approach if you've opted for font changes to
indicate changed word function, and it pretty much guarantees that the
reader will see some distinction (even if not the one you intended). But see
my previous comments for problems with changing fonts: they have to be
visually compatible for the process to work unobtrusively.
<<Now, then, back to the question of emphasis. As Geoff says, use italics
for emphasis. Yes, Geoff, this has been the practice for "more than a
century." Two centuries is more than a century, right?>>
More by a factor of two, as it happens. I was being lazy, and didn't want to
look up the actual dates. 100 years I was confident about; 200 would have
required a reality check, which you duly (not dully) provided. <g>
<<Don't bother with Garamond or any other serif face. They break up so badly
on low-resolution devices (all monitors are low-resolution devices) at text
sizes, that you gain nothing by using them and lose much in the way of
legibility.>>
That's a matter of opinion. I'd agree with you about Garamond, but speaking
as someone who spends most of my day and far too many nights editing other
people's words on the aforementioned low-resolution device, I find that my
error rate goes way up when I'm forced to edit in sans serif. Of course, the
key to editing successfully in serif is to use an appropriate font (Times
and its close kin work well for _me_) and type size (don't even think of
using anything under 12 point, and probably 14 for Garamond).
The problem with typography is that it's a highly personal thing, and what
works for one reader won't work for another. In particular, the problem I
find with sans serif fonts is that lower-case L (l), the number one (1), the
lower-case I (i), and the vertical bar (|) all look damn near
indistinguishable in most such fonts. Just you try proofreading a document
chock full of sans serif ilia, illuminations, and other ill-advised words
such as i|man without missing half the distinctions. I quail at the
prospect.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an
accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a
house"--Jules Henri Poincaré
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