Text Size: Pixels, Points, Ems and Percentages… Oh My!
Thursday, June 7th, 2007I’ve been thinking about a lot of Web related issues lately. One of them being how different browsers handle different units of measurement for text. I’ve gone ahead and constructed a page where you can test text size and image size against different browsers.
In most browsers, there are two methods to resize text, the keyboard shortcut (press Ctrl++, Ctrl+- and Ctrl+0) and the “View > Text Size” method.
Here are my findings:
You’ll notice on a PC in Firefox (version 2.0.0.4, for reference) using either method the font size will increase and decrease no matter what method of measurement you are using to size the text (em, px, pt, %). And the images stay the same size.
On a PC in Internet Explorer 7 using the keyboard shortcut will essentially “zoom in” on the page, altering the size of both text and image. However, using the “View > Text Size” method will only resize the text that is defined by ems and percentages.
On a PC in Internet Explorer 6 using the keyboard shortcut method has no affect on any page elements. Using the “View > Text Size” method has kind of a strange effect on text size. The text defined by ems and percentages resize as you’d expect, however the text defined by pixels and points also resize, but on a much smaller scale. The images stay the same size using this method as well.
Netscape (version 8.1.2) is based off of Firefox and behaves accordingly.
Opera seems to only have a zoom feature.