I am working in a different medium nowadays, using DITA. The companies I am consulting for have some standards that are, shall we say, a little different than I have seen in quite a few years of working in this field. The formatting and layouts I am working with are more common in Framemaker shops than in most online-help-development-oriented departments.
Specifically, the standards call for using a different font (like Courier), bold or italic text, or a special indentation for text that describes a user action or choice, a window name, a GUI element, and so on.
This scheme produces text with many formatted items in all the text. I’m curious about the real value of adding all the font changes in user instructions: Is is valuable, or is it only a distraction to users?
What do you think? Access the poll and provide your answers. I promise to post the results.
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