Suite101

Part 4 - Fiddling with Fonts


© Tracy Ryan

Aug 7, 2001


While the only way to change the appearance of your text using standard HTML is with the heading tags (ie. etc), there are tags known as "HTML extensions" that aren't official HTML but will work to spice up your page a little more. We have the people at Netscape to thank for the very versatile tag! Just to mention though, even though Netscape came up with the font tag, it will also work in the latest Microsoft (Internet Explorer) browsers, as well as most other browsers around.

Now, onto the fun! As with most other tags we've encountered so far, the tag requires its closing tag to make up the set. Any text that lies between this pair will be affected by the parameters we set for font (which we're coming to now).

The first parameter that we'll take a look at is size. We have already looked at changing the size of our text using the , ... etc but the font tags give us much more control as you'll see as we go along. As with the heading tags, we use numbers to specify the size we want our text to be. We can use whole numbers ranging from 1 to 7, with 1 being the smallest and 7 being the largest. If no font size is specified, the browser standard is size 3.

This is size 1 text.
This is size 7 text.

This is size 1 text.
This is size 7 text.

Font sizes can also be mixed up within the one sentence or even within a word.

This is a BIGword. And this word is GROWING

This is a BIGword. And this word is GROWING

Having earlier said that the standard font size is 3, we can change this for our web page by using the tag. Combining this with our tags will give us greater control over changes we may wish to make to our page, as you will see by the end of this article. If, for example, you wished for the majority of text on your page to be in size 4, you could specify the font tag to show size 4 or you could set the 'base font' size to be 4 and then you'd only have to do it once.

This tag is placed at the start of our section.

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The copyright of the article Part 4 - Fiddling with Fonts in Website Creation is owned by Dianne Reuby. Permission to republish Part 4 - Fiddling with Fonts in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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