Technical Writing – The Use Of Fonts

Technical writers have a vast array of fonts to choose from, and working out which are acceptable in your documentation can be a bit of a struggle at first. Apart from the convention that you never use ridiculously florid fonts such as they resemble hand writing from the 16thcentury, or novelty fonts of course. Here are a few tips on the use of fonts in your documents:
Sans Serif Vs Serif Fonts
Sans if a French word it means “without” and a Serif is a small tail that hooks off the edge of a letter or symbol. There is a school of thought in technical writing that headlines should ideally be in sans serif fonts and the body in serif fonts. In fact it probably doesn’t matter too much which font you choose as long as you select for readability.
Don’t forget that fonts can appear differently in print and on screen, Times New Roman looks particularly good in print but there are better options for online such as Verdana or Tahoma.
Italics
Italics are great for highlighting key phrases or specific learning points; however they draw the reader’s attention by being a little hard to read in the first place. So don’t overdo them by having whole pages of text italicised, you’re not going to be popular with the user if you do.
Bold
Headings should usually be in bold so they stand out from the rest of the text. Otherwise you can use bold sparingly for emphasis on really important points, or you can designate bold text to indicate a specific function (something often done for the names of buttons in software manuals for example). Bold is always better than ALL CAPITALS though, which just feels like you’re shouting at someone thanks to Internet social mores.
Keep it to a Minimum
If you have a company style guide you’ll already know this but use more than 2 (and at an absolute maximum 3) fonts and your documentation will start to look really disjointed. Fonts are only really there to carry the words where your content lies, not to become the content itself.
Keep them Common
One last thing on choosing a font is to try and keep your range of fonts in those commonly available in most systems. You can’t win every time on this but sticking to a range of fonts that come installed in Word and Open Office is a good starting point. If your reader doesn’t have the appropriate font installed on their machine, the machine substitutes a “nearest fit” which can play havoc with the structure of your document. If you choose an obscure personalised font, it might look great in house but disastrous elsewhere.