Exploring Font Families

In the world of print, you can use just about any font that you want or desire. You select the font that you want to use for your document and export your document in PDF so the fonts are converted to vectors. This allowes other people to see the font you chose even if they dont have it so they can see what your origional work looks like. On the web, you dont have this freedom of choice as far as fonts are concerned. Fonts arent part of the browser, they are served up for all applications on a computer from the system software where they reside.

Sizing Fonts

You can use three types of values to size fonts. They are absolute, relative, and 'sweatshirt keyworks'. Absolute is comes in pixels or inches, relative comes in percentages or ems, and sweashirt keywords come in small, medium, large, ect. There are pros and cons of using proportional sizing but you do want to choose what sizing you want. The pros are all type scales proportionally if the user uses the Text Sie menu choice to set the text larger or smaller. Another pro is as you fine-tune your design, you can proportionally change the size of all text by simply adjusting the body font-size and it changes the baseline size and other elements.

Font Properties

The relationship of font sizes is key to indicaing the visual hierarchy of the content within your document. This happens through an understanding of the various font properties, and as we saw previously, an understanding of how font properties can be inherited though the hierarchy of your document. An example is giving your text the h2 tag and style it with italic when you assign your tag to your choice of text. There are other options besides italic like normal and oblique. This determines whether a font is stylized or not with itaclics or your other options you gave the h2 text.