Re: Font tussle -- bolding bolding everywhere

[Lin Sims <ljsims -dot- ml -at- gmail -dot- com>]

According to Microsoft's Manual of Style, Second Edition, all dialog
options and titles are supposed to be bold, with capitalization following
the interface. They may have changed that in the third edition, but I don't
have that one.

I've worked places where the in-house style guide said not to use bold
unless it was bold in the UI, and others where it was no bold no matter
what, but the capitalization was always to follow the UI.

If you've got an in-house style guide that supports you, point to it and
tell your reviewer that you're following the guide. If there is no guide,
maybe you can make one.

In short, it depends.


On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Nancy Allison <maker -at- verizon -dot- net> wrote:

>    Hi, all.
>
>    My company's UIs use sentence style capitalization. So, the UI controls
>    for setting the reference level are labeled
>
>    Ref. level
>    Ref. level down
>    Ref. level up
>
>    I refer to these controls in text by capping each term: "The vial
>    controls are Ref. Level, Ref. Level Up, and Ref. Level Down."
>
>    I reserve bolding for those UI items that I am telling the user to act
>    on directly (select, tap, click, and so on.) But I know one of my
>    reviewers is going to come back to me with "make these bold so people
>    know they're control names" or even just "make these bold so they stand
>    out."
>
>    I can explain about the caps setting the names off, I can explain about
>    reserving bold for actions, but if my questioner is persistent, I need
>    a solid resource to explain why it's bad to have bold type popping up
>    all over the page.  Am I, in fact, simply going on my personal hunch
>    that overapplied bolding is distracting on the page and probably
>    reduces readability?  Have I simply made up these claims?
>
>    I just searched for "do not overuse bold text" and found a few
>    articles, but they are very general. They go so far as to say "Bold
>    less instead of more." Well, thanks.
>
>    Are there any actual readability tests or other source of data
>    regarding the effectiveness of varying amounts of bolding on a page? By
>    the way, translation costs are not even a factor, since our
>    translator's software recognizes and preserves the bolding codes. They
>    don't have to be inserted manually.
>
>    Thanks for all suggestions.
>
>    --Nancy
>
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-- 
Lin Sims

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