• Hi guys. My first post to the forum. I am somewhat a noob. I am working on getting my latest portfolio up and running and had some friends test it out on their computers. Some Safarit (on Mac) and others on Firefox (on Macs). No tests on PC yet.

    http://briangossett.com/wp/

    They all came back saying the same thing. The type seems too large. On my screen it’s nice and small the way I want it. But they see it really large and even sent me screencaptures of it large. Could someone help me. My stylesheet says this:

    body{
    margin: 0;
    font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Sans-serif;
    font-size: 9.5 px;
    text-align: center;
    vertical-align: top;
    background: #000000;
    color: #ffffff;
    }

    I also realize the images are too large in size (not file size) for most monitors and I am fixing that. It’s the text size thing that is boggling my mind. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The type looks fine in IE7 but is too large in FF3.

    Your style.css is very small (I guess that is good) compared to others I have seen. I can’t see where a style has been applied to your text – I see it has a format, like heading or paragraph but no style.

    Your font size is fine in my FF2. Your first have to understand that users can adjust font sizes of any site in their browsers options, so while your CSS may set to 9.5px – a persons browser option may be set to show a certain font at another size entirely.

    Further – using pixels for font sizes is not recommended anymore. The preferred standard is to use % sizes, so no matter what size font a browser is set to – a websites text will display at a set percentage of their options.

    Try setting your default font size to something like 80% and see what happens. 9.5 pixels happens to be rather tiny for many people, by the way.

    Thread Starter since78

    (@since78)

    So Saurus, instead of setting it to 9.5 px I would try percentages instead? I do realize 9.5 is really small. I set it smaller because I was under the assumption it was gigantic on other browsers. Thanks for the help so far. I will try the percentage out if I can figure out what to type in the style sheet.

    Here is a little trick I use when I am working on someone else’s site to help them fix something.

    At the top of your browser got to view … view source … open it in your text editor. Scan down the doc and find the area where you think you have a problem.

    It will give you the exact location of where that is defined in the CSS file.

    Then go to your CSS and change whatever it is you want to change, add or subtract.

    I have noticed the skins/themes to many of these software’s i.e. blogs, forums etc split their docs up and then present them as a single view which makes it rather hard to find what governs what.

    I think this method will help you figure out what controls what if you are not use to a lot of HTML or CSS.

    Of course ALWAYS BACK UP your original docs (I save masters to my own HD) just in case you really mess something up 🙂

    Good Luck,
    CT

    Yes – whenever possible use percentages. A font size set to 90% would then display on a users browser as 90% of their pre-set default font size. There are many reasons for using percentages – many of which I am not expert enough to describe. I might suggest doing a web search on “font percentages”, or simply going to a forum like SitePoint and ask specific questions about it just look through some of the posts on fonts and basic CSS. There is a world of info there from many of the top experts in the field of CSS and other sunjects.

    Re clinicalthinker’s tip … yes – checking the page source can be very useful if you know what you’re looking for, but a better idea is to use (assuming you use FireFox) the Firebug and/or Web Developer add-ons. With either, you simply right click on a section you have a question on and a popup tells you both the CSS and markup for it. Really excellent and must have tools.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Can I set a Fixed Font Size’ is closed to new replies.