When choosing how to size a font, what method or sizing-type should you use (e.g. em, pt, px, etc)? I've heard before that em is the best because it's the same on any monitor, but I don't really know what's the truth. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your time!
You kind-of have that backwards - %/EM is NOT the same on any monitor, that's WHY it should be used. %/EM in browsers that give a **** about accessibility (IE, Opera, some handhelds) will automatically enlarge 25% for large font/120dpi users or shrink it 25% for small screen displays. %/EM is entirely based on the browser default which is why on some handhelds 100% (aka 1EM) starts out at 12px or 14px and not the 16px that '96 dpi' systems use. That's why it's the weapon of choice for content. That and it's the only font sizing that IE6/earlier can use it's text-scaling to let users zoom in/zoom out with. PT - points, aka 72ths of an inch. A lot of people will bitch and moan about the use of because "That's for print!", which of course is bullcookies. PT is the only font that gecko based browsers like firefux will automatically resize to the system metric (aka 75/96/120dpi, or 144dpi at the new 150% in Win7) just like nyetscape (nutscrape?) before it (oh yeah, gecko was a complete from scratch new engine, sure it was)... That's why for a long time it was the font size of choice for CSS developers on things like forum software. The only REAL drawback to using pt is that IE6/earlier won't let you zoom in/change the text-size. Nowadays those complaints are, well... kind of losing meaning as IE6 slips in market share. PX means pixels - a miserable **** accessibility /FAIL/ and should only be used when you have to - like when you have a image interaction like a fixed height background or behind an image replacement technology. In those cases where you are forced to use it 12px should be consider the SMALLEST acceptable size, and as I've said a few times on these forums I get twitchy using anything less than 14px. For large font/120dpi users 12px or smaller is effectively illegible without zooming in, and as a rule users are more likely to say "screw this" and go use some site that does NOT use fixed metric fonts than they are to use the zoom. As a rule pixel metric fonts should NOT change in size if all you are sizing is text - Mozilla browsers all screwed the pooch on that thanks to the Netscape heritage again part of why even today firefox is an accessibility /FAIL/ on most every front, though at least since FF3 they adopted the Opera approach of handling zoom (as has IE). Font sizes can be confusing though because of all the different ways they can be rendered... and that as a rule you do NOT want it to appear identical on all machines because the end user wants stuff to scale to their usability size, not the one some art *** graphics guy goes nutters over having pixel perfect. I have a WIP page (that is supposed to go into a finished website at some point, but my health has interfered with getting it done) that shows all the different fonts and their effects/behaviors. http://battletech.hopto.org/html_tutorials/fontCompare/template.html Hope this helps.