Page 10 - McMurrey Notes

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There are not any strongly developed trends in the use of colour in technical text, either online or hardcopy, other than the use of green and blue for hypertext links, mentioned earlier. Printed technical texts rarely use colour because of the cost. Of course, if the documentation ships as a PDF, then colour can easily used, and it's up to the reader whether print it out with a colour printer.
If you want to use colour, plan it carefully. Don't expect readers to remember that red signals one idea, blue another idea, and green still some other idea. Just stick to one colour. In general, avoid using colour for extended text. Instead of making an entire warning notice red, just make the Warning label red and leave the warning text regular roman (text like the regular body text).
Better still, read some of the standard literature on colour in the technical communication field. There are general design issues and international issues.
Colour:
Colour is used in technical text but it is expensive and hard to manage through the publishing cycle.
However, colour is easy to use in online information. It's common to see hypertext links, for example, using colour. Online helps typically use green while web pages typically use blue for new links and purple for links the user has already explored.
The tendency to use colour indiscriminately in online information is much like the tendency to go wild with bold, italics, type sizes, and alternate fonts in hardcopy information. The feeling must be something like, "It's there, it's cool, so
let's use it!"
In general, it's a bad idea to combine emphasis techniques, for example, bold and italics. In nonprofessional technical text, you'll see such garish combinations as all all-caps bold-italics or all-caps bold-italics with double quotation marks. Avoid these!
One legitimate combination is to use italics with alternate fonts. For example, when you show the syntax of a command, you want the entire text to be in Courier, but you also want the variables to be in italics:
copy OldFileName NewFileName
QQuestion: Can you a) distinguish between emphasis and highlighting of text?