Font tag and an introduction to links


© Oisin Prendiville

This is the last article of '98 and the first article of '99 so I will start by wishing everyone a happy New Year. To those who celebrated it, I hope you had a Merry Christmas.

This month I will discuss the font tag and links.

The first thing I will discuss is the font tag. This tag as you may have guessed lets you change the font of the text on your page in a number of ways. You can change the typeface, the size and the colour.

As is necessary by the nature of the tag, it also requires and end tag so its prototype is:
<font ...>This is the affected text</font>
where "..." is the parameter list.

The parameters you can set are face, size and color (note "color" as opposed to the English "colour" - it's the American spelling).

FACE sets the typeface (for example "times new roman" or "arial").
SIZE sets the size of the text.
COLOR sets the colour of the text.

If the typeface name has only one word in it - for example "verdana" - there is no need to enclose it in quotation marks and the code will look like:
<font face=verdana>
If the name however consists of two or more words - for example "brush script" - then the name must be enclosed in quotation marks and the code will look like:
<font face="brush script">

It is important to remember that people viewing your page over the Internet will not have all the same fonts as you installed on their computer. Therefore you can list a number of fonts that could be used. This is done as follows:
<font face="font 1, font 2, font 3">
If the viewer of your page has "font 1" on their computer then that is the font that will be used, if not then "font 2" will be used and so on until the end of the list is reached. If no fonts on the list match then the default font will be used.

The size of the text is set on a scale of 1 to 7 with 7 being the biggest. Size 3 is the default. You can also set the size of the font using proportional values. For example "+2" or "-1". As an example:
<font size=2>
is the same as writing:
<font size="-1">

Color can be set using either hexadecimal notation or one of the predefined colours as discussed in the previous article.

The next thing I will discuss is links. If you have ever surfed the Internet, you have encountered and are probably familiar with links. A link is a part of a page you click on to take you to another page. This page can be another page on the same site, a completely different page on a different site/server, another point on the same page. You can also link to an e-mail address.

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Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: View all related messages

8.   Mar 15, 1999 3:33 PM
This is not possible, sorry.

-- posted by Oisin


7.   Mar 12, 1999 7:38 AM
Is it possible to use the tag to justify text on both left and right?

-- posted by GKCruey


6.   Mar 1, 1999 6:29 PM
I found that stripping all the carriage returns within the table solved the problem. Strange, eh? 8)

Different code is needed for inside Suite101 And outside.... oh well... ...


-- posted by Kirk


5.   Feb 20, 1999 5:19 PM
Kirk, if you are referring to editing within Suite101 and not outside it, the particular design of the Suite does lend itself to often having extra lines.

One thing is to have no carriage re ...


-- posted by Bill_Samuel


4.   Feb 20, 1999 12:41 PM
how do I get the spaces to go away in the html below? Everything between the lines should have no blank lines, but....I get them anyway.

Here is a direct link to

-- posted by Kirk





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