Postion of text in page layout? [Archive]

Luther

11-09-2003, 06:25 AM

Does anyone know how to "lock in place" the position of html text on a webpage? I'm referring to text that has been positioned where I want it on the page using layout tables and cells. I'm making it so the text is of fixed pixel size---so that the text always will appear the same size---regardless of which "text size" (smallest, smaller, medium, larger, largest) is the current setting on a typical web browser.

The way I'm making text on a webpage stay fixed at a certain pixel size is by using the following code in a page's head section:

<head>

<style type= "text/css">

.bodytext {font size: 15px}

.heading {font size: 19px}

</style>

</head>

Each line of text in the body of the page can have these classes ("bodytext" or "heading") applied to them. The result is that the size of the text always stays the same when viewed through a browser. However, when a user tries different text size settings on the browser, the position of the lines of text still changes with each setting. The best way to see what I'm talking about is to look at this example at www.lakeinthewoods.org. Try adjusting the text size to different settings---you'll see that the position of the text on the homepage jumps around, it doesn't stay "locked" in the middle.

If you check out www.cnn.com or www.si.edu. you'll see that no matter what text size setting you try, the size and position of all text on the page stays locked in place--exactly where the designer meant it to be. This is what I am trying to achieve. How is it done?

Maybe the way to do this involves using css exclusively, and not working with html tables and cells?

Thanks,
Chris Flanders
cflanders@adelphia.net

Fang

11-09-2003, 02:31 PM

give each selector a font-size
div, p, span, etc {font-size:14px;}

Paul Jr

11-09-2003, 04:34 PM

That doesn't seem to work in Mozilla 1.4, that's the version I'm using, so I'm not sure about any others. On my current site I set the size of some text to 13px, but Mozilla seems to ignore that, and resize the text anyway.

spufi

11-09-2003, 05:31 PM

Modern browsers give the user the ability to over ride your setting the font to a certain size. This gives people with poor eye sight the ability to view text on your site even when you define it too small for them. Browsers like Opera and Mozilla give the user the ability to do this. It looks like only IE keeps it the same if the font size it already defined. I'll go out on a limb and say IE will change that for IE 7.