Questions about look and feel.

[Syed.Hosain at aeris.net]

Hi, all.

 

This is perhaps a bit of a vague set of questions, but I am interested
in improving the look of our manuals and specifications documentation
and would like to see what others are doing in this regard.

 

1.  Specifically, I am working on various manuals for our software API's
as well as general technical specifications.

 

2.  These tend to be reasonably dry documents, where I have used
numbering for chapter and section titles so people can refer to them by
those numbers when talking internally here, as well as when we get
questions from our customers.

 

3.  The target audience for most of these documents are engineers
(software and hardware) and technical managers and the like. No consumer
docs, or marketing folks or web page formats, etc.

 

4.  At the present time, my chapter and title fonts are Arial (various
sizes depending on the section and subsection level) and my body font is
Palatino Linotype in 11 point.

 

5.  Pretty much in black text most everywhere, except where I use Red
italic font in a sidehead to make certain short one-to-two sentence
notes (also in italic, but in black) stand out right next to the
sidehead word. These are important notes to not overlook by the reader.

 

My goal is to improve legibility.

 

1.  Are there any sample documents (at any site) that people could point
me to as ones that they liked a lot for (a) legibility and (b)
readability for such documents?

 

2.  Do people think that a Sans Serif font improves legibility for body
text? I have seen some recent manual examples using "Calibri" in a 10
point size (that I wasn't sure that I particularly liked, but if it
makes things easier to read, then I'd be willing to try it).

 

3.  What about color? Like in Section and chapter titles?

 

4.  In many places in my manuals, I have numbers (usually enclosed in
quotes to designate strings) that I show in a fixed-width font (using
"Consulas" in 11 point), even when in paragraphs that have body text in
Palatino. I have experimented with making these a fairly Dark Blue
color, and also tried bold (in black), to make them stand out a bit
more. This seems to work reasonably well, but I am not sure that I want
to get too much color in these manuals and specifications just yet, so I
have not actually sent anything out yet!

 

Finally ...

 

1.  I am looking to see if I can find a few people to look at two PDF
extracts (less than 10 or 20 pages) from two of my
manuals/specifications to get some critiques along the above lines -
look and feel criticism only (the words and content are a different
thing entirely J!). Any volunteers who could take a bit of time for
this? Thanks in advance!

 

Regards,

 

Z