Manuscript for HTML Tutorial #15

Listed below is the manuscript of all textual instructions used in HTML Tutorial #15 - Changing Your Web Page Text to a Different Font. Most of this text is displayed inside the yellow balloons used to guide viewers as they watch the lessons.

Students and instructors may find it helpful to have a hard copy of these balloon instructions. You may print this web page to use as an aide in following, referencing, or demonstrating the web design series.

Manuscript Table of Contents

Entire HTML Tutorial Series

Tutorial #15 - Changing Your Web Page Text to a Different Font

Lesson #15: Fonts. Click the play button to begin the tutorial.
If you don’t specify a particular font for your web page, most browsers will display Times New Roman by default.
Let’s see how to change this by adding a style rule.
Unless you have a special reason to use multiple fonts, it’s usually best to use the same type of font for all of your text.
So, we will include our font rule as a declaration of the body selector.
This way, all the text in the body of our web page will display in the same font.
First off, we’ll separate our new declaration from the existing declarations, with a semicolon.
The property for changing the face of our font is font-family.
Let’s use arial for the value of our font.
Now, with the font-family property, we can also specify alternate values, in case our first choice is not available on a visitor’s computer.
We could use another font name, but instead let’s just use a generic family name.
Sans-serif describes a group (family) of similar fonts to which arial belongs.
This way, if arial is not available, the alternate font displayed will be a pretty close match.
Be sure to include a comma between the different values.
OK, let’s check it out.
Now all of our text is displayed as arial.
Let’s try a different kind of font.
We’ll change our initial value to comic sans ms.
Whenever you use a value with spaces, it should be wrapped in quotes like this one.
Now all of our text is displayed as comic sans ms.
Let’s glance at some other common fonts.
There’s Georgia.
Verdana
Impact
Courier New
We’ll just stick with arial for this web page. Since it’s a sans-serif font, it will be easier to read on a computer monitor.
Go ahead and choose a font for your web page, and then move on to Lesson #16.

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