What fonts to use

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CanAussie
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What fonts to use

Post by CanAussie »

G'day,

I am really new at producing documentation.

What font/s are recommended for a chm output? What about print?

Cheers,

CanAussie
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by wclass »

The Microsoft style guide recommends using "Verdana" for chms. For print output there is a million choices - we still use Arial, but we are starting to look at the new fonts with Office 2007.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by RamonS »

I always use Arial. It is a clear font that most people can read without problem. In general, stick with fonts that are guaranteed to be available on any Windows system otherwise Windows will probably attempt to replace the font with something else that is available and it may just pick something that makes your help not look as intended.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by KevinDAmery »

I use this for my CHMs:

font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

This way, if Verdana is present (which it will be on newer Windows systems) it will use that. If for whatever reason it isn't present, Arial will be used. If neither is present, Helvetica is used (although it would be a pretty weird Windows system that didn't have Arial.... it's in the font family mostly for best practices reasons in my case, although if you were doing WebHelp instead of CHM it would be important for any Mac users). And if all else fails, it'll use the system sans-serif font.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by forfear »

Is Trebuchet the new font for Vista help?
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by KevinDAmery »

Not sure - however, I would be hesitant to start using a Vista specific font exclusively at this stage unless you know your customers are running Vista. I don't think it's adoption rate is high enough yet to be able to assume most customers have it.

Adding a Vista font to a font family, of course, would be perfectly safe, as long as you also include older fonts to fall back to. Same thing for the Office 2007 fonts (Calibri and Cambria) - they're ok as a part of a font family, but don't assume every user has them.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by MikeKatz »

forfear wrote:Is Trebuchet the new font for Vista help?
Trebuchet is an XP font.
Mike
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by SteveS »

CanAussie wrote:G'day,

I am really new at producing documentation.

What font/s are recommended for a chm output? What about print?

Cheers,

CanAussie
All of the above is good advice - particularly using font families.

So called best practice is to use sans serif fonts (like those mentioned above) for online help while serif fonts (such as times) for printed. Something to do with the serifs don't work as well on screen and cause blurred letters while they help in letter recognition in printed documents (and the higher resolution means it's not blurred).

For printed documents use a font size from 10 - 12 (11?), depending on your chosen font. The readibility gurus also say left aligned rather than justified helps readability as well. For online (including chums) you might want to use relative font sizing. There is a bit of stuff about this scattered throughout the forums, some of it pretty recent. Basically you set the base font size on the body tag and use sizing such as 200% for H1, 100% for P and 80% for .MyFooterWriting ( :) ) and so on.

Whatever you decide, consider your user needs first. If you're writing for the visually impaired, for example, you (probably) need large plain fonts and high contrast colour schemes.

If you need more, search the net for "readability"...
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by LTinker68 »

And if you're new to XML and HTML and CSS, then you might look at this site -> http://www.w3schools.com.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by RamonS »

SteveS wrote:The readibility gurus also say left aligned rather than justified helps readability as well.
Really? I can't stand looking at printed or on screen text that is only left justified. It looks cheap and the fringes on the right side are distracting. I wonder why ever newspaper in the world prints the text justified if that makes it so tough to read. Maybe the newspaper people and I just got it wrong all this time.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by MikeKatz »

RamonS wrote:
SteveS wrote:The readibility gurus also say left aligned rather than justified helps readability as well.
Really? I can't stand looking at printed or on screen text that is only left justified. It looks cheap and the fringes on the right side are distracting. I wonder why ever newspaper in the world prints the text justified if that makes it so tough to read. Maybe the newspaper people and I just got it wrong all this time.
I guess personal taste must play a part. I far prefer left justified myself, and always use it. I find with right justified text, when there's a long word on the next line, the text can get too spaced out and becomes hard to read on the previous line. Of course, in a perfect world, one shouldn't use long words :D, but with technical documentation you don't have much choice.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by KevinDAmery »

RamonS wrote:
SteveS wrote:The readibility gurus also say left aligned rather than justified helps readability as well.
Really? I can't stand looking at printed or on screen text that is only left justified. It looks cheap and the fringes on the right side are distracting. I wonder why ever newspaper in the world prints the text justified if that makes it so tough to read. Maybe the newspaper people and I just got it wrong all this time.
Uhhh.... which newspapers are you talking about? The ones here in Canada at least are ragged right, not full justified. (They used to be full justified, about 20 years ago, but they changed over.)

The way I've always heard it is the unequal line lengths makes it easier for the eye to track which line it needs to go to.

Also, I agree with Mike about the word spacing. This can especially be a problem if you have a short line length due to a sidebar or picture inset.

This is a bit of a battle here - I prefer left justified for readability, but my boss (who's also the owner of the company) prefers full justified because it looks neater.
Until next time....
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by RamonS »

Aha, well, shows that I should read more Canadian newspapers. German newspapers (see example here) print justified. So do also the Times Union of Albany and the Hartford Courant (the oldest, continuously published newspaper in the United States).
The argument of long words is a bit weak though, since one can use hyphenation, which is often done right by applications (don't recall Flare having that option). There are some exceptions, which appear to be oddities of the English language, such as considering a-qua or pe-dagogics correct hyphenations. Aqua is one syllable since the old Romans came up with that word and the greek word for child is "ped". That the English language cuts the child in thirds is really disturbing.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by KevinDAmery »

RamonS wrote:Aha, well, shows that I should read more Canadian newspapers. German newspapers (see example here) print justified. So do also the Times Union of Albany and the Hartford Courant (the oldest, continuously published newspaper in the United States).
The argument of long words is a bit weak though, since one can use hyphenation, which is often done right by applications (don't recall Flare having that option). There are some exceptions, which appear to be oddities of the English language, such as considering a-qua or pe-dagogics correct hyphenations. Aqua is one syllable since the old Romans came up with that word and the greek word for child is "ped". That the English language cuts the child in thirds is really disturbing.
Well, I always turn hyphenation off, again for readability reasons. It may be different in German, since German has a predilection for long words and you'd end up having to push words to the next line far more frequently than in English.

(BTW, even if was using hyphenation I wouldn't consider hyphenating a word as short as aqua, and for pedagogics I would be more inclined to do peda-gogics - so I agree the examples you posted would be odd....)
Until next time....
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by forfear »

Ramon and Kevin, the issue of justified and left aligned depends also of the context of how spaced out your columns are in the layout. I think for newspapers with narrow columns, its most of the its justified, but the text layout program they use enables something called optical character alignment to space the characters more evenly. MS Word has a tendency destroy layouts with too much spacing when justified paragraphs are turned on. A good or professional print page layout program will optimize the spacing so that readability is maintained with some intelligent word, character alignment that is nigh close invisible to the eye...
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by RamonS »

KevinDAmery wrote:Well, I always turn hyphenation off, again for readability reasons. It may be different in German, since German has a predilection for long words and you'd end up having to push words to the next line far more frequently than in English.
German is one of the few languages that allows combining words into new words. That is a great benefit as one does not need extra words to create the connection. But I guess that is beyond the issue of font selection and layout.
KevinDAmery wrote:(BTW, even if was using hyphenation I wouldn't consider hyphenating a word as short as aqua, and for pedagogics I would be more inclined to do peda-gogics - so I agree the examples you posted would be odd....)
Which is also incorrect given the greek origin. It needs to be ped-ago-gics. And while I give out corrections I might as well correct myself, the greek word for child is "pais" and "paideia" means schooling.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by egag21 »

I prefer to center my text.
:P
Last edited by egag21 on Thu Jul 31, 2008 10:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by tbean »

KevinDAmery wrote:... if Verdana is present (which it will be on newer Windows systems) ... if you were doing WebHelp instead of CHM it would be important for any Mac users).
Macs typically have Verdana. Also, the current Mac system font, I believe, is Lucida Grande -- at least that's what the 10.5 (Leopard) help uses. Another good Mac font is Geneva -- a bit dated now, but it was designed to be a screen font, so it has good legibility at poor resolution. Not so great in print, though.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by CanAussie »

G'day,

Gee, looks like my tiny spark started a conversation.

Thank you all for your great advice!

CanAussie
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by trent the thief »

RamonS wrote:
SteveS wrote:The readibility gurus also say left aligned rather than justified helps readability as well.
Really? I can't stand looking at printed or on screen text that is only left justified. It looks cheap and the fringes on the right side are distracting. I wonder why ever newspaper in the world prints the text justified if that makes it so tough to read. Maybe the newspaper people and I just got it wrong all this time.

Justified news columns are a holdover from early days when the paper was extremely expensive. How many times have you seen kerning/word spacing nightmares in a newspaper?

I used justified text a couple times, but now it's all left justified.

For fonts, I use sans serif type for screen and century or Zapf Elliptical for print.
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by pdenchfield »

Does anyone use different fonts for headings when going to print-based output (FrameMaker or Word)?

If so, how do you do it? I tried keeping Verdana for body and selecting Georgia for all the headings, but I think my css might be invalid...?

Code: Select all

body
{
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, "Sans Serif";
}

h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6
{
	font-family: Georgia;
}
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by forfear »

You'll need to define it in a print medium subset in the stylesheet or whatever medium is associated with your print outputs

@medium{

etc..etc
}
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by KevinDAmery »

I do exactly what you're asking for, Pamela. In online formats I use Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif as the font family so that no one who accesses the help will have a problem with the fonts, but for print formats (Word, PDF) I use Futura. As Forfear said, you create an @Print medium, then change the font specification in the print section of the stylesheet.

BTW, your CSS statement with multiple headings is technically correct, but I find that Flare's stylesheet editor doesn't work with that syntax. You'll probably find you have fewer hassles if you instead do:

Code: Select all


@media print
{
     h1
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }

     h2
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }
 
     h3 
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }

     h4 
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }

     h5
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }

     h6
     {
        font-family: Georgia;
     }
}
It does make the CSS marginally larger, but it's more compliant with Flare and other HTML editors so in the long run it's easier to manage.
Until next time....
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by pdenchfield »

Good info. Thank you, Kevin!
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Re: What fonts to use

Post by pdenchfield »

...and thanks to forfear, also. Yes, important to associate the styles with the mediums.
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