font size | Live Writer Basics

Selecting fonts in Live Writer

Posted by Ludwig in General on September 15, 2011

When setting up a blog connection Windows Live Writer downloads the blog template. This specifies the fonts along with many other features. This does not mean that you have no choice of fonts, indeed, the Font group on the Home tab offers all the fonts installed on your computer.

You can apply any font to the normal text and to the headings, but you cannot set the defaults. Live Writer reverts back to the blog template defaults – as it should. After all, you selected the design and appearance of your blog carefully and you want it to stay that way.

There are times when a different font is called for. As in other applications, like Word, for example, the font can be selected before text is typed or later by selecting the text and applying the new font. There is a problem with that. Your readers may have different machines and may not have the font installed that you have chosen. Their browser will make a font selection that might not fit with the image or mood you are trying to create.

Here is an illustration of that problem. The four snippets are from the same blog post as seen on different machines. The first shows the text as intended by the writer in a font called “Curlz”. This font is not common on computers and the browsers on two machines substituted common fonts. In one case a sans-serif (Arial style) in in the other a serif font (like Georgia). The fourth snippet is from an RSS feed in which the background color was dropped. I have seen unreadable text in RSS feeds because the original text was white or yellow on a dark background. With the background rendered white, white font disappears completely.

There are some fonts that are pretty well common to all computers. Or at least there are font families that are very similar and the stylistic differences are small. “Helvetica”, “Arial”, “Verdana”, “Calibri”, “sans-serif” will render close enough to each other that a substitution might not even be noticed. Same goes for “Times New Roman”, “Georgia”, and other “serif” fonts. The problem really comes in when you use very decorative fonts. If you are using a special font only for headings or very short text portions, the work-around I like is to insert that part as an image.

Let me illustrate:

Decorative Headings

Here the heading text is just a screen capture set with no frame. The image does not link to anything. As an image, it will appear the same in all browsers and even in RSS feeds.

When I do that, I also like to repeat the heading in normal text and style – just so the search engines will find the term.

Font sizes

You may notice that all the fonts on your computer are available in the font selection box, the same is not true for the font size selection. Only seven sizes are offered. Let me illustrate why. Here is a line with seven words each set in one of the offered sizes:

one two three four five six seven

Here is the HTML code produced by Live Writer for this line and on the right the font size choices.

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven

You can see that Live Writer uses font size numbers rather than the point or pixel size. What’s more, when no size is specified the font size is rendered in the design template default, in this example the size for this blog – Arial at 9.8 points.

Keep these peculiarities in mind and your blogging will be easier.

.:.