RE: Your typographical conventions

["Chinell, David F \(GE Indust, Security\)" <David -dot- Chinell -at- GE -dot- com>]

Nancy:

I follow the Sun style guide for typographical treatment of GUI components. No special typographical treatment. (Sun and the CMS support your use of italics for references to the titles of other works.)

My preferred font set might be:

Sans serif for headings and display text (headers, footers, tabular material, captions, callouts)

Serif for body text

Monopitch for user entries and system messages

Italics for emphasis and titles of works.

You didn't mention URLs and web pages and the like. Sun sets them in monopitch, which makes the same kind of sense as it does for user entries and system messages -- it shows the spacing and punctuation very clearly. But I'm still not comfy with this. Neither do I like italicizing URLs -- suggested by the MS MoS -- as this seems to obscure them.

When there's a chance of confusing English-like GUI labels with supportive text, either changing the labels to I-caps or setting the label in double quotes is fine with me, provided it's consistent across a product library.

This discussion comes up from time to time, and I feel I'm in a minority about GUI components. As a bold experiment, why not try doing without while you're drafting stuff up. You can always add special typography later. If you do, please use specific character styles for GUI elements, rather than just bolding labels.

Bear

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