RE: Advice on menu styling

["diotima" <diotima -at- myway -dot- com>]

hi patrick,



i share your distaste of beaucoup de bold. i puzzled over this for some time myself. i like things nice and clean, tending toward minimalist. too much bold...actually, too much of any kind of formatting makes me want to barf. after trying a few different things, i found something i like a lot.



i tend toward the microsoft way, but in place of bold, i use a sort of pseudo bold. i create a style that i usually call "myStrong" and make it bold, but then i fine tune the color to a darkish grey. i don't have the exact hex/rgb handy, but i spent a fair amount of time until i got it juuuuuuust right. too black, and it's bold; too light, and it's ineffective.



what a difference! or, what a difference to me. i doubt anyone else realizes that the color of the word "file" in my step one is different than the color of the "how to bla bla" title just above it. but now my word docs and robohelp docs look yummy!



ah, sometimes it's the little things in a tech writer's life that make life beautiful.



try it.



-diotima









 --- On Wed 03/09, Patrick Wright < pdoubleya -at- gmail -dot- com > wrote:

From: Patrick Wright [mailto: pdoubleya -at- gmail -dot- com]

To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:40:37 +0100

Subject: Advice on menu styling



<br>Wondering what people's preferences are for documenting use of menus<br>in a user's manual?<br><br>Microsoft uses:<br>From the File menu, choose Open.<br><br>With "File" and "Open" in boldface.<br><br>Apple uses:<br>Choose File > Open.<br><br>Not bold.<br><br>IBM uses<br>...Microsoft style or<br>Click File --> Open.<br><br>Also boldface.<br><br>I find boldface distracting when many menu items are documented on one<br>page, or multiple menus are documented in one paragraph. Apple's style<br>is cleaner, but I find it gets lost in the paragraph.<br><br><br>Thoughts?<br>Patrick

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