Small punctuation, big effect

In the day-to-day work will often ignore the role of punctuation, in fact, whether in the English interface text design or Chinese interface text design, punctuation is an important part. To make good interface design, we should not only pay attention to the expression of vision, interaction and wording, but also pay attention to the use of punctuation marks. Here to some of the relevant issues to discuss, hope to be able to draw attention to everyone.

　

The role of punctuation marks

Punctuation has roughly three functions: the table pauses; the tone; the nature of the expression.

1, the table pauses, used to indicate the structure of the sentence.

2. The tone of the table. There are usually three kinds of conversational tones: stating expectations, telling others something, asking questions, asking a question, expecting someone to do something. These kinds of tones are expressed in the conversation by means of punctuation marks in writing.

3, the nature of the table words. Some words add some punctuation, and the nature of the words changes. "Happy" means an adjective, and "happy" denotes the name of a film or book or article.

　

Differences in Chinese and English punctuation marks

1. Some punctuation marks in Chinese that are not in English.

A) comma (,), in English, the division of the Center of the coordinate components are good.
b The title number (""), there is no title in English, titles, newspapers and periodicals are italicized or underlined. In English, articles, poetry, music, film, painting and other names and some proper nouns are also commonly used in italics.
c) Interval number (·), in English, the need for the interval between the use of commas.

2. Punctuation marks that are not in some Chinese in English

A) apostrophe (')
(b) hyphen (-)
c) slash (/)

　

Use of punctuation marks in user interface text

When punctuation is used in user interface text, the following are mainly followed

And for specific punctuation, there are some specifications.

　　Period

1, the control label or the main title is not used after the description;
2, auxiliary instructions, auxiliary explanations or other static text containing complete sentences after use.

The following figure:

Here the distinction is mainly to see the nature of the text content, is the main text or auxiliary text, the difference between the two texts in the following is used in English punctuation.

　　Question mark

You can use it after all the questions, and the question mark applies to all types of text, as shown in the following figure:

　　Exclamation number

With a strong emotional color, should try to avoid using, only in some special circumstances can be used, such as task completion.

　　Colon

1, at the end of the external control label use;
2. Use a colon to guide a set of parallel items.

The following figure:

　　Elliptical number

Indicates incomplete or incomplete, using ellipses in the following cases,

1. Indicates that the command requires additional information. Not all operations that display other windows are ellipses, but only those that require additional information to complete the operation.

The menu item does not require additional information to complete.

A menu item is a command or implied command that requires additional information to complete.

2, indicating that the text was truncated.

3. Indicates that the task is in progress.

　

The use of English punctuation in Chinese interface

Different from the ordinary written expression, in the interface design will appear mixed with the phenomenon of English punctuation, it's not a designer's fault. But English punctuation will help improve accessibility, so you should use English punctuation in some important information, such as the colon at the end of the tag and the incomplete ellipsis in the command, data, and label. Question mark following the main heading.

　

A rough summary of some commonly used punctuation and user interface text in the special case, which inevitably have omissions, welcome everyone to point out the omissions of the treatise.