5.2 Formatting Overview

At this point in your knowledge of web design and the use of a tool like Dreamweaver 

MX to design your web pages, there is so much that, regardless of your efforts, is out 

of your grasp.  In the following section, we introduce you to a few formatting con 

cepts that give you an understanding about the differences you may experience 

between what you create and how others see it.  For more information about this 

topic, turn to the Best Practices chapter and see  Font  on page 88.

Font faces

Traditionally, the font face refers to the name of the font applied to the text, such as 

Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, etc.  Because the font displayed on a user's 

monitor is determined not by the font used on the web page, but rather by the fonts 

available on the user's computer, it is possible that the user will see a different font on 

the web page than you intended when you designed it.  To help anticipate this, 

Dreamweaver MX makes use of font combinations instead of a single font.  Font 

combinations allow web designers more control over which fonts are likely to be used 

by a computer and seen by the user.

One example of this is that Macintosh computers usually have the Helvetica font, 

however it is rarely found on computers running Microsoft Windows.  Thus, if a Mac 

user designs a web page using the Helvetica font, it is likely that Windows users will 

not see the Helvetica font when viewing the web page.  More than likely the Windows 

user's computer will substitute the Helvetica font with the font designated in their 

browser program.  If the substituted font is larger or smaller than the Helvetica font, 

then it may affect the layout of the content on the viewer's screen in a way that the 

designer would not want.

To circumvent this problem, you can create a font combination that tells the user's 

computer which fonts to try to use before resorting to it's own default font.

Font sizes

Font size (Dreamweaver refers to it as Text size) on a web page is not as consistent or 

specific as the font point size used in word processing documents.  Thus, you won't 

see font point sizes such as 10, 12, 14, etc. in Dreamweaver MX; instead you'll see 

values 1 through 7,  and +/ 1 through +/ 7.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX once again is doing its best to maintain accurate 

HTML, and font point sizes, as you may have seen in Microsoft's FrontPage, are not 

necessarily accurate.  The long and short of it is, that similar to font faces, the font's 

size can appear larger or smaller depending on many variables which you have no 

control over, such as the viewer's computer, monitor size, and screen resolution, just 

to name a few.

With web pages, the font is basically larger or smaller, relatively speaking, in relation 

to other font sizes on the page.  Traditionally, the default size is 3.  Higher text size 

numbers will appear larger than the default, and lower text size numbers will appear 

smaller than the default size.

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Seattle University Information Technology Computer Training

Formatting Content

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX