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Subject:Re: Font and Case for best readability on a Form? From:Bill Burns <BillDB -at- ILE -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 19 Sep 1997 07:58:03 -0600
Jennifer made some good points about captilaization and translation. In
addition, someone long ago posted that a relative who did research in
reading theory indicated that advanced readers recognize words by shape
rather than by reading each letter. Using all caps forces readers to
read by stringing letters together rather than pattern recognition, so
it slows people down. So, it might not be bad for short strings of text
that you want to catch people's attention (albeit there are better
ways), but all caps is inappropriate for body styles.
Bill Burns
Technical Writer
ILE Communications Group
billdb -at- ile -dot- com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jennifer O'Neill [SMTP:writer -at- ARITECH -dot- COM]
> Sent: Friday, September 19, 1997 4:04 AM
> To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject: Re: Font and Case for best readability on a Form?
>
> I'm faced with this problem of all-caps at the moment. One of our
> engineers wrote a manual in English and used all-caps for all the
> headings. The manual has now been translated into German and some
> other languages.
>
> I don't like all-caps as it more difficult to read:
> it is hard to quickly distinguish between the letters. I also
> don't like it because of the localisation problems it causes me.
> Languages use capital letters differently. I want to rewrite the
> all-caps in this manual to lower case but I can't. In German the first
> letter of
> nouns is written as a capital. I don't know German, so don't know
> which words are nouns. The heading are 4 cm wide so run down the page
> as columns. Looked OK in English. German not only uses more words
> than English but the words are often much much longer. Result: I have
> long
> columns of headings with lots of hyphenation. Even more difficult to
> read.
>
> Don't use all caps, particularly if you're going to translate the
> manuals later.
>
> Jennifer
>
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