Re: Typographical treatment of GUI components

[Michael West <mbwest -at- bigpond -dot- net -dot- au>]

> This decision was lately challenged by one of our
> engineering managers. That's why I'm asking if anyone has
> any information on whether it's worthwhile or not. I'd like
> some support for our decision, or to have my eyes opened to
> the value of bolding these names.


See if this helps.

Just to see whether I still subscribe to the
convention of bolding GUI items in instructional
material, I opened a few random topics in the
Help file of my mail reader (OE 6).

There, the convention is used, and I find that
it does help. Given a set of well-written instructions,
I can (if I want) simply scan down the list of instructions
without actually reading, picking out the boldface
words. Voila! What it gives me is the bare-bones sequence
of mouse clicks or keystrokes that I need to execute.

A real time-saver, in my view. It would be much harder to
pick out the command names and menu names without 
the boldface type.
--
Mike West
Melbourne, Australia



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