RE: RE : RE: Your thoughts on punctuation?

["Andrew Warren" <awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com>]

Yves JEAUROND wrote:

> Typographical wisdom dictates that using ALL CAPS
> does mislead users on messages of the same length,
> especially short ones.
> 
> There are exceptions: the display may be too small or badly designed
> for CAPS/no caps to make a difference. You'll have to judge the
> usability.

    Yes, this is definitely an exceptional case in which typographical
    conventions for documents don't apply.  Ms. Weeks' 4x20 keypad
    display is undoubtedly composed of low-resolution (5x8-pixel or so)
    dot-matrix characters, and it probably doesn't even show lowercase
    letters with descenders.

    For a display like that, it's been my experience that all caps is
    generally more readable than mixed case.

    Also, it's frequently difficult on such a small display to separate
    a heading from the text beneath it -- with only 4 lines of 20
    characters each, there's often no room for blank lines or
    punctuation between phrases -- so differences in capitalization can
    be used to make the distinction.

> For politeness, a period is cool.
> "Please wait."
> Tell your engineers gently about customer etiquette, manners,
protocol,
> grammar and syntax. :-) And how rude customers find it when these
> are ignored.

    Yes, but I think this display really is more like a sign than like
    a document or even a dialog box.  If it were larger and had a
    more delicately-formed font, lowercase and full sentences with
    punctuation might look really nice, but I don't think the 4-line
    by 20-character, 5x8-dot format allows for those niceties.
 
    The big diamond-shaped roadside sign that says:

          THRU
         TRAFFIC
          MERGE
          LEFT

    would be harder to read if it were in a smaller font that said:

          Through
      traffic, please
       merge to the
          left.

    Right?

    -Andrew

=== Andrew Warren  - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
=== Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
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