Fonts

[Jennifer O'Neill <writer -at- ARITECH -dot- COM>]

Hi there,

I'm curently writing the style guide for my company and need to
recommend the fonts that should be used in our manuals. Here's the
history:

At the moment almost anything goes, tho' Helvetica, Arial, Times New
Roman  and Times  are the most commonly used. As we are only one and
a half writers and 2 DTP people in a  company of three factories and 14
international  sales offices (and the four of us are located in
different countries),  most of  our manuals are written by R&D or
sales staff. All use Word. The factories are responsible for getting
the manuals printed and 2 of them send out the manuals to be printed in
Word format with the True Type fonts Arial and Times New Roman.
One factory however copies & pastes all their Word manuals into
Pagemaker  and changes to Post Script fonts Times and Helvitica for
their  printers. I find this a waste of time as it delays the release
of the manuals. I would like manuals to be done only in Word with
True Type fonts (our manual are rarely more than 100 pages and are
often less than 50). I expect my proposal for True Type font to be
derided by this factory because of their printers. They look at the
manuals from what the printers want and I look look at them from what
those who are writng & updating the manuals want (they don't want
Pagemaker). I know that True Type is slower to print but what else do
 I need to know about fonts and printing? What else do I need to know
about printing from Word?

Thanks,

Jennifer

 TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot-  Send commands
   to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
  Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/  or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html