Inserting and Formatting Text > Setting fonts, styles, color, and alignment > Setting and changing fonts and styles

Setting and changing fonts and styles

Use the Property inspector or the Text menu to set or change font characteristics for selected text.

To set or change font characteristics:

1	Select the text. If no text is selected, the change applies to subsequent text you type.
2	Choose from the following options:
	To change the font, choose a font combination from the Property inspector or from the Text > Font submenu.
	Browsers display the text using the first font in the combination that is installed on the user's system. If none of the fonts in the combination is installed, the browser displays the text as specified by the browser preferences. (See also Modifying font combinations.) Choose Default to remove previously applied fonts; Default applies the default font for the selected text (either the browser default font or the font assigned to that tag in the CSS style sheet).
	To change the font style, click Bold or Italic in the Property inspector, or choose a font style (Bold, Italic, Underline, and so on) from the Text > Style submenu.
	To change the font size, choose a size (1 through 7) from the Property inspector or from the Text > Size submenu.
	HTML font sizes are relative, not specific point sizes. Users set the point size of the default font for their browsers; this is the font size that they will see when you select Default or 3 in the Property inspector or Text > Size submenu. Sizes 1 and 2 will appear smaller than the default font size; sizes 4 through 7 will appear larger. Also, fonts generally look bigger in Windows than on the Macintosh, though Macintosh Internet Explorer 5 uses the same default font size as Windows.
	To increase or decrease the size of selected text, choose a relative size (+ or -1 to + 4 or -3) from the Property inspector or from either the Text > Size Change submenu.
	Tip: One way to ensure consistency with font size is to use CSS styles with your font size set in pixels. For more information on CSS, see Using CSS style sheets.
	These numbers indicate a relative difference from the basefont size. The default basefont value is 3. Thus, a +4 value results in a font size of 3 + 4, or 7. 7 is the maximum sum for your font size values. If you try to set them higher, they display as 7. Dreamweaver does not display the basefont tag (which goes in the head section), although the font size should display properly in a browser. To test this, compare text set at 3 and text set at +3.