Providing Alternatives to WYSIWYG

Some applications try to present a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") view of a document, making the text on the screen reflect the appearance that the text will have on the printed page. However, some people may want to print text in a tiny font, but not edit it when it is that small. In reality, the size of type on screen need not be linked to the size that the text will be when printed. It is easy to allow the user to adjust the size of information on the screen through several methods, such as draft and zoom modes, which are described in the following sections.

Draft mode

One method for allowing the user to bypass WYSIWYG is to provide a draft mode, which uses a single font for all information. This mode customarily uses a single type of annotation, such as underlining, to indicate characters that would normally be drawn with any form of additional formatting, such as bold or italics. (Draft mode also provides an added benefit for users running on extremely slow systems or with little free memory, because it typically performs better in those situations.)

Ideally, you should allow the user to choose the draft font. Using the system font may be the best way to conserve memory, but it might not be the best for the user's vision.

Zoom features

An extremely valuable feature that applications can support is a "zoom" facility, which scales everything in the document to a user-selected ratio. Many applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft® Excel, offer this feature, and it is beneficial to many users who do not consider themselves to have disabilities as well as those who do. Use of the TrueType® scalable font technology ensures that characters will remain clearly defined at almost any size.