I typically use a bold version of the default dialog font for labels and
such. That works well. In fact it's so common to do that these days, if
you don't do it, your app looks so 1990's.
I have never seen such dialogs, with bold labels.
Or if I have seen them, I thought they are from the 1990's. Remember the
bitmap font used in dialogs? Was fat and looked bold.
Don't remember it?
http://toastytech.com/guis/win31regedit.gif
That is the modern look with bold fonts?
Maybe bold does work well, for English.
Not for Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and others.
Thing is: there is a setting in control panel where I can set the fonts
I want for labels, buttons, titles, menus, etc.
The includes font family, style, size, foreground and background colors.
If I want bold, I set it there. Any aplication should respect my
preference. If not, it is crap.
Would you appreciate an application that uses an italic font size 5
throughout? Just because I think it's cool?
tastefully boldfacing different parts of the dialog. MS even does this with
the list control. If you go to My Computer in XP, you will see the
different groups such as "Hard Disk Drives", "Network Drives", etc. in
boldface. I am simply extending this concept into my own dialogs where I
put some static controls as boldface.