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Controlling Font Size on Web Pages

Posted April 2003 by Steve Sinchak

I've noticed recently that Web-page designers seem to be competing to see how small a font they can use before readers need to break out a magnifying glass. Although small font sizes are only a minor annoyance when running in a low resolution (768 x 1024 or less), a small font size becomes a huge pain if you run a high-resolution setup (1600 x 1200 or greater), even on a large monitor.
Because these Web-page designers are trying to force a fixed font size on their viewers, using the View, Text Size menu option in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 doesn't fix the problem. However, you can configure IE to ignore these attempts to give you headaches and take back control of the font size by performing these steps:

  1. Launch IE.
  2. Open Tools, Options, General.
  3. Click the Accessibility button.
  4. Select the Ignore Font Sizes on the Web page's check box.
  5. Click OK.

Following the above steps returns font-size control to you by overriding the font size that the Web page requests and using whatever font size you've chosen as the default on the View, Text Size menu. Another option if you have a wheel mouse is to place the cursor within the Web page and hold the Control key down. Move the wheel to either enlarge or diminish the font size (rather than to scroll the page). works on all windows even windows server 2003

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