Suggestions for manuals site

(Tom Chadwin) #1

I'm working my way through the manuals site at the mo. A terrific resource to be sure. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I have two observations. Firstly, a lot of the instructions are written as continuous text in paragraphs, rather than broken down into numbered steps, which can make it quite tricky and tiring to follow. Secondly, am I right in guessing that the design was done on a Mac? The body typeface (Helvetica?)renders dreadfully on my PC, and combined with the constant (and I think misguided) italicization and colouring of Matrix concept words and phrases, this makes the manuals again pretty difficult to read.


Tom

(Josh Sherwood) #2

[quote]
I'm working my way through the manuals site at the mo. A terrific resource to be sure. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I have two observations. Firstly, a lot of the instructions are written as continuous text in paragraphs, rather than broken down into numbered steps, which can make it quite tricky and tiring to follow. Secondly, am I right in guessing that the design was done on a Mac? The body typeface (Helvetica?)renders dreadfully on my PC, and combined with the constant (and I think misguided) italicization and colouring of Matrix concept words and phrases, this makes the manuals again pretty difficult to read.



Tom

[/quote]



Hi Tom. Thanks for your comments and suggestions for the site.



While the majority of our site's content is the same as the PDF manuals we were previously using, we have been making an effort to see how the new HTML based format can be used to improve the usability of our documentation and making changes accordingly. We'll definitely take your suggestions on board regarding the content of the site and see what we can do. I'll also be sure to have a chat to our design team regarding the typeface concerns you have.



Thanks again.

(Danny Peters) #3

Hi Tom, thanks for the constructive comments, they are always welcome.


Can I assume you are using a PC running XP without clear-type turned on?



The design was built with both Macs & PC's in mind (and testing). However I have done a few more tests after your post and realised that half of the PC's used for initial testing did not have Helvetica installed and the other half were running Windows7. With no Helvetica the fallback is Arial which displays fine with or without clear-type. Windows7 has clear-type turned on by default and therefore Helvetica displays fine also.



Would you mind turning clear-type on as a test to see if your text renders any better? (I understand this is not a fix for everyone though).

You can turn this on by right clicking on the desktop and choosing Properties, then go to the Appearance tab, then hit the Effects button, and lastly change the font smoothing dropdown from Standard to ClearType.



Danny.

(Tom Chadwin) #4

Hi Danny (and thanks, Josh)


No, I've always had ClearType enabled (just double-checked now, and it is on). Yes, IE8/XP, and with a True Type Helvetica installed. I presume this might be the problem, as I don't know where this Helvetica version comes from - XP built-in? One of the reasons I mentioned this is that I've come across this specific display issue on other sites managed by people I know are Mac-based.



Update: removed my Helvetica, and it failed over to Arial fine, legibility improved immeasurably. So, I don't think the problem is yours after all, but is my mysterious Helvetica, whose provenance is unknown to me.



Sorry for the distraction



Tom