Re: Typographical treatment of GUI components

["Richard G. Combs" <richard -dot- combs -at- voyanttech -dot- com>]

David Chinell wrote:

> Does anyone have any information to support (or not) bolding
> GUI component names in printed reference manuals or Help
> systems?

As various responders have made clear, there are advantages and
disadvantages. It makes the page look rather busy. OTOH, it makes it easier
to skim a procedure.

I resisted bolding GUI components for a long time (sometimes winning and
sometimes losing that argument). I finally embraced bolding when I began
encountering interfaces with sentence case (or all lower case), "natural
language" labels.

This kind of step works fine without bolding:

    From the Output list, choose...

But this one? I think the component label begs for some kind of typographic
distinction:

    From the Select an output format list, choose...

I prefer bold to italic. For one thing, it's easier to read on line.
Quotation marks? Yuck! :-)

Richard


------
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT voyanttechDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT freeDASHmarketDOTnet
303-777-0436
------







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