Re: (Fwd) Use of Bold and Italics

[Maynard Hogg <maynard -at- GOL -dot- COM>]

Bernice Kieffer <bernice_kieffer -at- MENTORG -dot- COM> wrote:

>In software applications, I use bold to indicate the Menu command or dialog box
>field a user needs to select and bold-italic to indicate an application
>command, procedural function, or dialog box field information a user needs to
>enter.

I find this discussion very timely as I'm struggling with yet another
debugger manual, this time DOS-based, that I'm translating. The
material isn't all that hard (or new), but the formatting problems!

Left to their own devices, the Japanese mark everything with square
brackets--unavoidable in Japanese because bolding Chinese characters
decreases legibility at the small point sizes used and there isn't
really room for underlining--but that looks mighty strange in English.
(This particular client must realize this because they've already
translated all menus into a semblance of English--another source of
endless frustration--and used bold.)

As an interim measure, I'm postponing the problem by marking the text
with HTML-like tags, but the deadline for the first instalment is
Friday.

===

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