Lesson 2: Font Limitations

You need to be aware of a major difference between web documents and printed documents. In print, once you print the document, its appearance is fixed. Users cannot change the way a printed document appears. Graphics, if included in the printed document, will be part of the document. The layout of the printed document is exactly as you designed it. The fonts you use appear the way you want them to.

However, when you publish on the web, you cannot control how the document will appear on the local user's machine. For example, the local user can turn off the display of graphics. The local user can make changes on the browser to select which fonts appear and what size fonts appear with documents, totally overriding the font attributes in your code.

Although you can code font sizes and font styles and font colors in your document, remember that users can override these settings. There are legitimate reasons for a user to override your fonts. Some people find the screen easier to read with a particular style of font or a particular font size. This is particularly true for users with some vision problems.

Changing fonts in Netscape display

The menu which controls font settings in Netscape Communicator is found under Edit, Preferences. Double-click on the Fonts (underneath Appearance) to have this window appear:

If, for example, I changed my settings to look like this, and I check the radio button to Use my default fonts, overriding document-specified fonts, then specific font types or font sizes specified in the document will be ignored, and all pages with a variable width font (which is most of them) would appear with Book Antiqua type font (the variable font selected in the window).

Defaults in Internet Explorer

The menu which controls font settings in Internet Explorer is found under Tools, Internet options. The resulting window has two buttons which affect our discussion: fonts and accessibility. Selecting the fonts button brings up this display:

Selecting the accessibility button brings up this display:

Through this Accessibility window, you can tell your browser to ignore colors specified on the web pages, font styles, or font sizes. I have checked here all of the formatting options, but on a "normal" installation, these boxes are not checked.

The point of this is to make you aware that your carefully designed site, in terms of the font face used and font sizes used, can be totally over-written by people who are viewing your web pages.

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This document is part of a series of lessons on Dreamweaver Basics, given by Linda Ffolliott, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Arizona.