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Text formatting

Heading Commands

Heading commands are used extensively in HTML documents to create headings.

There are six (6) heading commands: <H1> through <H6>. <H1> is the largest and <H6> is the smallest. Here are their relative sizes:

Heading commands create bold, sized text, with space beneath, as shown above.

Fonts or Typefaces*

* It should be noted that the <font> tag is deprecated, and as such it is preferable to apply text attributes through a Style sheet.

While you may add a typeface attribute to a <font> tag,

eg: <font face="Arial ">

the fonts that you specify must be available on the computer of the person browsing the page, or the typeface will revert to whatever is the default display font for the local browser.

To maximise the chances of your page displaying with the ‘correct’ typeface, you should:

• select a commonly available typeface, which is viewable on all platforms.
• provide alternative similar typefaces, with a ‘generic’ option (eg: ‘sans serif’)
• select the typeface for legibility on a computer screen (sans-serif is best)
• eg:<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif ">

Font Size Commands*

To control font size in the body of the text, the <FONT> tag with a SIZE attribute may be used. The font size attributes available are:

1 to 7, -1 to -7 and +1 to +7

Sizes 1-7 are ‘absolute’ sizes, while the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ sizes are relative to the default font. The code is written like this:

When setting font sizes it should be kept in mind that:

• Different browsers on different platforms render font sizes quite differently - test your font sizes before publishing
• Font sizing, like other font attributes, may be more efficiently set in style sheets (see Style sheets).
• Inline font tags override any font attributes in style sheets settings.

Aligning Text

By default in HTML, text is justified to the left of the screen.

To set text alignment add an attribute to the <p> paragraph tag, eg:

The <DIV> tag

The block level <DIV> tag is a way of dividing the document into blocks for individual formatting. It may be used to apply alignment and many other attributes (such as Style sheet information) to larger blocks of content, eg:

(See Page layout for more about the DIV tag)

White space

Spaces and line breaks need to be explicitly stated

Use the <br> tag for starting a new line without a paragraph break and the ‘&nbsp;’ character (non-breaking space), for adding more than a single space between characters in your text.

Eg:

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