Re: Controlling text-resizing in IE

From: Andrew Clover <and@doxdesk.com> · Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 11:50:28 +0000

Todd Ferguson <tferguson@in-touch.net> wrote:

> What is the actual tag for setting the text as an absolute
> point value?

This is an authoring question unrelated to the development of
web stylesheet standards, and hence off-topic here. Please try Usenet
or one of the many good web design mailing lists, for example
webdesign-l.com, evolt.org or, specifically for matters to do
with CSS, http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/css-discuss .

There is no "tag" to do this, but you can set the CSS font-size
property to a value measured in point units, eg.:

  <span style="font-size: 12pt">

Do not do this. Points are a bad unit of measurement for the
web, because they will be interpreted fairly randomly for on-
screen display depending on the whims of the operating
system and browser. 'pt' lengths should only ever be used
in print-specific stylesheets, where the length of the absolute
units (points, inches, cm, etc.) is known to be correct.

For fixed-size text pixels ('px') are by far the best option. Still
some browsers will allow the user to resize text set in pixels
because so many designers have abused this feature to
produce excessively small unresizable text in body copy.
There is essentially nothing you can do to counter this, short
of turning all your text into images.

--
Andrew Clover
mailto:and@doxdesk.com
http://and@doxdesk.com/