The font size used on my site scales reasonably well to your browser's window, and so does the font face used (serif for larger, sans-serif for smaller screens). This should be just fine for most of the Readers, but some may prefer to set their own, custom size and face — for many possible reasons. Why not?

To change the font which will be used in rendering of these pages, you may use the buttons below, but not before reading the disclosure that follows. You will need to allow cookies from wrotniak.net for this to work!

In addition to changing the font size, you can also change the font family used, or specify a particular font face.

Be careful using the Custom button: you will have to spell the font name right. If the font is missing (maybe misspelled?), your browser will use its own choice; you can recover from this by using one of the other buttons.

Note: if you now go to a page which your browser keeps cached, you will have to refresh the view in order to see the changes!

Clicking on the yellow area will display your wrotniak.net font settings in the browser's status bar (assuming the bar is shown and accessible to scripts).

Disclosure

In order for all pages at wrotniak.net to use the font you've selected, these pages must "know" what your selection was. This is done by storing two cookies on your computer. These contain two pieces of information:

• I've been to wrotniak.net (without divulging who I am)
• I've selected a given font size and face there

When you open (or refresh) any page on wrotniak.net, that page is asking your browser for these cookies, and the font is set on that basis. This information is not shared with any other party or Web site.

Obviously, if your browser is set to not accept cookies, font settings become unavailable. All other functionality of my pages remains unaffected.

Perhaps 95% of Web pages send you cookies, often dozens of them, without asking for any permission. Most commercial cookies are used to trace your browsing from one site (or page) to another. I may just have more respect for your privacy.

If, for any reasons, you wish to remove my cookies from your computer, just click on Remove Cookies above. If you do that, my pages will use the font depending on your browser's window size (not the full screen size!). Actually, you may prefer this approach.

The remainder of this page is for the people who like to tweak their system, so it may be safely skipped, unless you want to know details.

Details

While I could just leave the choice of font faces used to your browser settings, I decided not to: a great majority of users never set this preference in their browsers. Therefore my script is trying to use the fonts as follows (choosing the first face available on your computer from each list):

• Serif fonts: Constantia, Georgia, Times New Roman
• Sans-serif fonts: Calibri, Verdana, Arial

If none of these are found, the default face for a given group will be used, depending on your system's setting. You still get a choice between serif and sans-serif presentation.

Windows users: the Constantia and Calibri fonts come only with Vista. XP installs Georgia and Verdana, and under older versions you may end up with Arial and Times New Roman.

The new Vista fonts are most attractive and very readable, so they are worth having on the XP. Other attractive alternatives are Candara and Corbel (sans-serif), or Cambria (serif).

Microsoft offers them for free as a part of the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer (you can find it here). The viewer does not take much space, and you may always uninstall it right away (after having copied the fonts to a safe folder, to move them back to Windows/Fonts afterwards.

And you wouldn't imagine how many people I've seen running Windows XP without font smoothing. (Less likely on Vista, where smoothing is on by default.) The improvement smoothing brings to how most fonts (True/Open Type standard) look is huge, especially on LCD screens. Make sure you are using it.

Mac users under OS X 10.4 or higher have Georgia and Verdana installed as essential fonts, so these will be used, unless expressly overridden.

Linux: I don't think most of Linux distributions have the fonts listed above, but you can always use the Custom button to specify the exact font you want. After all, you do it only once, as the choice is persistent between sessions.

Compatibility

The JavaScript and HTML code has been tested on Firefox 2/3, Opera 9, and MS Internet Explorer 7/8. It should work with older (if not too old) versions of these applications as well, as it uses only standard features. It will not work on phone/PDA browsers, as these have their own page rendering schemes, ignoring any specified fonts attributes.