Fonts

Fonts provide a unifying feature to Help files without sacrificing creativity and without interfering with the particular needs of individual products and users. Fonts affect readability and eye fatigue, and provide visual cues to the organization of information.

Principles

nUse the Normal style, 10-point plain MS Sans Serif, for body text in Help topics.

This is the most readable screen font available. If you are shipping a product that will be run on Windows version 3.0, use 10-point Helv. Do not use Helvetica.

If a bitmap is included within a paragraph, change the line spacing to Auto to avoid text overlap.

nAvoid mixing two font sizes in body text.

You can use 8-point text sparingly, for example, in callouts to graphics, in labels, or as bold headings for nested tables.

Shortcut keys and keycaps are an exception, as recommended in the Microsoft Publications Style Guide. Use 8-point CAPS to format shortcut keys (Figure 4.x).

(Do not use the small kaps formatting attribute because the text may not wrap correctly.)

nUse a single font style for body text. It increases readablity and visual flow.

nIf you plan to use color for text other than jumps, use it sparingly and for a specific purpose. Make sure that the colored items are the most important items on the screen.

nAvoid the use of italic except for variable arguments because it is difficult to read. (Italic for variable arguments is consistent with the industry standard.)

nUse plain text with initial caps for book titles.

nUse bold for topic titles, subheadings, and literals (such as programming statements or text you want the user to type). If you want subheadings to stand out, use bold. If you don’t want them to stand out, use plain text.

nUse Letter Gothic, Courier, or System font for syntax statements.

nAvoid using TrueTypeÒ fonts. Not all users have True Type fonts installed.

Strategies

nIf you do use TrueType fonts, consider what you are trying to accomplish, and the fonts’ accessibility to the user. Either ship the fonts with your product or make sure that users will have them.

nMS Sans Serif is strictly a screen font, so it doesn’t appear in the Font list box in Word for Windows. To format text as MS Sans Serif, either apply the appropriate style from the authoring template style sheet or type the font name in the Font box.