CSS for text size

[Prime]

I remember using a CSS code that made it so all the text on my site was a size and not even changing the size of the text on the browser would change the size. Anybody know what I am talking about? Anybody know where to find this?

[Nightfire]

font-size:12px I think it's just px and pt that never change despite user settings

[meow]

And that's only in IE Win. IE Win users can still disable author font size altogether.

[brothercake]

It's not a good idea to use fixed fonts, because users for whom it's too small to read, can't read it.


Here's an added complication, for essentially academic interest - a CSS px is not the same as a real pixel on your screen; it’s a notional pixel, on a scale that has 1:1 ratio at 90dpi. If your visitor's display has a lower resolution, then notional CSS pixels will be smaller.

This isn’t an issue for Windows users, since Windows assumes 96 pixels per screen inch; but at 72dpi (Macs, and some unixes default to this) it will be around 20% smaller. If you're already using a small font, it becomes unreadably tiny.

http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20010604.shtml explains it much better than I can, but IMO underestimates the seriousness of it (because that article is all about Macs, and on the Apple only Opera actually interprets this correctly)

[Skyzyx]

Although I agree (mostly) with brothercake, you'd just set the size in points. However, this only works in IE, as Gecko browsers have the wonderful ability to change the font size anyways.

I used this technique in my earlier days, because some people would change their font sizes and my websites would look terrible with the bigger text on their browsers.

Now, I'll design it the way ot should look, but I also use pure XHTML and CSS for everything, and add a feature of switching stylesheets, with new stylesheets having larger font sizes, and modifications to the CSS positioning so that it still looks good.