3: Formatting Text in Java

Encoder Data Matrix ECC200 in Java 3: Formatting Text

Assigning a typeface to your text Setting basic font properties Adding style to your text Colorizing your text Working with paragraph settings

ey, you do this That s the essence of a CSS rule The selector picks the elements to work with, and the properties assign formatting styles to them In 2 of this minibook, we explain the Hey, you part, by focusing on the ins and outs of selecting different parts of your document In this chapter, we follow up with the do this part for your text We begin by showing you how to format various character properties before moving into paragraph properties

One of the most important design decisions you make in your Web site is your font selection Your font style either complements your overall design or clashes with it Whatever your ultimate selection, you need to be sure that the fonts you select are widely available on the computers of the people coming to your Web site If the font you pick isn t available for the browser, the browser substitutes another, similar style font The most common fonts fall into two categories serif and sans serif A serif typeface has short cross lines, or curves, at the ends of its character strokes Some common serif typefaces are Times Roman, Times, Garamond, and Palatino Sans serif fonts are typefaces that don t have serifs Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and Lucida Grande are common serif typefaces

As you consider the fonts to standardize for your Web site, consider these tips: You may want to select different fonts for your normal text and headings However, don t choose more than one serif and one sans serif per page Back in the early days of the Web, serif fonts, such as Times New Roman, were usually the default fonts for a Web page because studies have shown them to be more readable Sans serif fonts were usually reserved for headlines However, many Web designers are now choosing sans serif fonts as the standard font for body text Georgia and Verdana are slightly larger at a given point size than other fonts in their family The reason is that these two typefaces were created to be easy to read on a computer display

Use the font-family property to define a set of fonts, organized by order of priority This property can be composed of specific font names, generic font families (see Table 3-1), or (more commonly) both Consider, for example, the declaration font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; The browser would first look for Helvetica font If that typeface isn t found, it tries to use Arial and then Verdana Finally, if none of these is found, it reverts to any sans serif font it can find

Table 3-1

p { font-family: Arial }

However, you often want to use a list of fonts rather than a single one When you use a series of fonts, the browser tries your preferred font choice first (the first in the list) If this font isn t available, the browser continues down the list Adding the appropriate generic font family name as a final item ensures that the general style of the typeface is used Suppose that you want to use the sans serif style Lucida Grande font as the default font for your site, but you want to have a set of acceptable alternatives You can define the rule in the body selector and have it look something like this:

body { font-family: Lucida Grande , Arial, Verdana, sans-serif }

Notice that if the font name is composed of multiple words, you need to enclose the name in quotation marks In a second example, you want to assign the default paragraph font to be a serif font, headings to be sans serif, and a special url class to be in monospace The CSS rules look like the following:

p { font-family: Palatino Linotype , Times New Roman , serif; } h1,h2,h3 {font-family: Lucida Grande , Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; } purl { font-family: Courier New , Courier, monospace; }

If you re unsure how closely two typefaces match, look closely at the uppercase Q and the ampersand (&) These characters are among the most distinctive in the typeface alphabet