[austechwriter] Re: Annotating documents and making them 'attractive'
- From: "Michael Lewis" <mlewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 11:54:05 +1000
Cathy Morison:
> Does anyone have a method they are happy with, or have seen used
> effectively somewhere?
Check out the typical MS and Adobe manuals. You might have some argument
with content, but visually they work very well. You can use the same design
principles without going to full four-colour process on coated stock!
> Also, how do you deal with varying sizes of screenshots, some of which
> have been reduced in size to fit on a normal portrait page? If they are
> centred, should they be centred with the text (which is indented about
> 1.5cm) or with the level 1 and 2 headings (full width)? The larger
> graphics really need to be wider than the page. Should I bite the
> bullet and remove these to a landscape page?
There's probably no "one size fits all" answer. You need to tie in with the
overall design structure. If you don't use centring for any text, why centre
the screen shots? Better, in general, to use as few vertical axes as
possible, and to left-align to the axes rather than centre. Captions should,
of course, line up on the same axis. (I avoid centring of text like the
plague, as it's known to reduce readability. So then I never have a centre
axis for graphic alignment -- I always align graphics and captions to the
same left axis as the surrounding body text. Ideally, there should only be
one body text indent, regardless of hierarchy, but occasionally clients have
dictated otherwise.)
Do you really need those over-size screen shots? Consider extracting
portions of the screen, with enough of the window edge to enable the reader
to locate the relevant portion. Sometimes, large screen shots simply include
too much info (too many fields) for the reader to be able to locate things
quickly. (The latest version of SnagIt has good facilities for treatment of
cut-off edges.)
Michael Lewis
--------------------------------------
Brandle Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia
http://www.brandle.com.au
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