I once worked with a technical writer who had the ironic initials DOC. I was occasionally diverted from my software development tasks to help her with technical documentation and I learned a lot from her.

One of the things I learned was how effective it can be to use a well-selected font to convey information. Any writer (and most readers) see the need for and use of different fonts for headlines vs. body text, and to add emphasis in one way or another. But one thing we did in that environment that has shaped my technical writing ever since is use a special font for user interface text.

As a brief aside, it’s helpful to understand the difference between a typeface and a font.

• A typeface (sometimes called a font family) is a design for letters, numbers, and symbols that has some unifying design goal. A typeface is often referred to by name. I grew up with Helvetica. All the cool kids are using Aptos now. You’d recognize Impact as the typeface used for text over photos in memes, even if you didn’t know the name. Other examples are Courier and Bookman.
• A font is a typeface with specific properties like height (usually in points), weight (light, normal, bold), style (italic, roman), and sometimes width.

Thus the font “Courier, 12 pt. bold” is a 12-point-high, bold rendering of the Courier typeface.

Bonus fact: in typography, “roman” generally means upright. That is in contrast to “italic” (or oblique) text, which leans to the right. (Confusingly, Times New Roman is a typeface and you can certainly use Times New Roman, italic as a font.)

Back to using fonts in technical documentation; Unlike content in newspapers and novels, technical documentation talks a lot about things you see on the screen and things you type in response. Often user input is rendered in a monospace typeface, one where every character has the same width. Many systems have good support for this. A common idiom for marking user input is with backticks (`). Markdown does this, GitHub comments, and even recent versions of Outlook Web Access implement it. (If you work in raw HTML, you can think of the backticks like <code> tags.) A common style for this is to render the text between the backticks in monospace (often Courier), one point size smaller than the surrounding text, and bold. With this convention, `this is user input` is rendered something like this is user input.

The innovation I learned from DOC is to also use a specific font for user interface text. The font needs to be different enough from the surrounding text to stand out but not so different that it’s unattractive. The general rule I use is: a narrow version of the body type, one point size smaller, and bold. In modern Microsoft Word, the body type is Aptos 12 pt. so my UI text is Aptos Narrow, 11 pt., bold. This might look like “Type a value in the Username field.”

Creating a UI Text Style

I find it strange that I have never found a system that has this built in. But I have developed some workarounds.

Trac

When I first worked with Trac, I added a macro that added UI text formatting. I wanted something easy to type but with a sort of “quoting” vibe (like backticks are backward single quotes). I settled on double less than (<<) and double greater than (>>), which I intended to be reminiscent of guillemets («, »). With this convention, “Type a value in the <<Username>> field” is rendered like the last example. I still use this nearly every day.

Desktop Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word, you don’t need to write any Python to create new style.

1. Find Styles in the Home ribbon.
   
2. Click the button on the right to expand the style box.
   
3. Click Create a Style to open the Create New Style from Formatting form.
   
4. Click Modify… to show more options in the form.
   
   • Enter a name of your choice.
   • Pick Character as Style type.
   • Pick Default Paragraph Font for Style based on.
   • Pick a font and size as appropriate. (Aptos Narrow works for recent versions of Microsoft Word where the default font is Aptos.)
   • Pick other options as desired.
5. Click OK.

Now your new style is available to apply to any text in your document.

Microsoft Word Online

It’s not quite that easy in Office 365 (or whatever they are calling it this week). The online versions of Microsoft Office tools don’t have all the features of the desktop versions. However, the online and desktop versions work well together so you can add a style to an online document with the desktop tool. (No doubt this depends somewhat on what licenses you have and other details but this works for me.)

1. In the online version of Word, drop down the Editing button and pick Open in Desktop
2. When prompted, confirm you want to Open Word.
   
3. Create the style as above (or do whatever other editing you want to do).
4. Close the desktop app (that’s all, just close it!).
5. Click Continue Here in the online app