Re: Font and Case for best readability on a Form?

[Jennifer O'Neill <writer -at- ARITECH -dot- COM>]

I'm faced with this problem of all-caps  at the moment. One of our
engineers wrote a manual in English and used all-caps for all the
headings. The manual has now been translated into German and some
other languages.

 I don't like all-caps as it more difficult to read:
it is hard to quickly distinguish between the letters. I also
don't like it because of the localisation problems it causes me.
Languages use capital letters differently. I want to rewrite the
all-caps in this manual to lower case but I can't. In German the first letter of
nouns is written as a capital. I don't know German, so don't know
which words are nouns. The heading are 4 cm wide so run down the page
as columns. Looked OK in English. German not only uses more words
than English but the words are often much much longer. Result: I have long
columns of headings with lots of hyphenation. Even more difficult to
read.

Don't use all caps, particularly if you're going to translate the
manuals later.

Jennifer

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