RE: RE : RE: Your thoughts on punctuation?

["Ladonna Weeks" <ladonna -dot- weeks -at- comtrak -dot- com>]

See comments below... 


Ladonna Weeks
ladonna -dot- weeks -at- comtrak -dot- com
314-895-7674
cell: 314-210-1652

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Warren [mailto:awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 3:10 PM
To: Yves JEAUROND; techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Cc: Ladonna Weeks
Subject: RE: RE : RE: Your thoughts on punctuation?

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.

Actually, the keypad displays case differences pretty well, and
uses descenders. My problem with that is that the programmers
want to start every word with a capital, which is another battle
I'm trying to fight. For example, is "server" supposed to be a
proper noun? Most people here seem to think it is.

    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?

This is an interesting example. Thanks. I'm still on the fence as
to whether our keypad instructions are more like dialog boxes or
more like signs. They do sometimes contain menus of options and
the user has to press a number followed by an ENTER button to
select from the list.

    -Andrew

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

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