Setting Viewing Preferences

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Setting viewing preferences

When viewing webpages in your browser, you have some control over how you view the material you surf. Listed below are five viewing options you can use:

Increasing and Decreasing Font Size

There are times you may be viewing a webpage with small font or you may simply wish to increase the font size to reduce eye strain. There is an easy way to quickly change the font size. In Netscape, you would choose "Increase Font" from the "View menu as follows:

In Netscape: Go to the "View" menu and select either "Increase Font" or "Decrease Font."	In Internet Explorer: Go to the "View" menu, then Text Size, and select the font size you prefer.

On some webpages, this command will have no effect because the text may simply be part of an image.

Stop Animations

Ever go to a website and find yourself completely distracted by the number of moving images? In Netscape, there is an option in the above menu to "Stop Animations" so you can surf a website without movement.

Stop Loading

As you know, it sometimes takes a long time to load webpages. If you went to a page then decided you did not want to continue loading it, press the "Stop" button on your browser toolbar. The command is also available in the "View" menu shown above. In Netscape, it is called "Stop Page Loading." In Internet Explorer, it is the "Stop" command in the "View" menu. In either browser, pressing the "Esc" key on your keyboard will perform the same action.

Changing Fonts

In your browser, you can specify which fonts and font sizes are used to display web pages. Internet Explorer users can find a menu similar to the one below by going to the "Tools" menu, selecting "Internet Options" and clicking on the "Fonts" button on the "General" Tab.

To do this in Netscape,

open the "Edit" menu
choose "Preferences"
open the "Appearance" group
click the "Fonts" category to see the following screen:

choose an encoding to determine which types of letters and symbols to use.
choose your default fonts from the Variable Width Font and Fixed Width Font
pop-up menus. Fixed-width fonts have, as the name implies, a fixed width for each character.
click one of the following listed in Netscape:
- Use my default fonts, overriding document-specified fonts
  - default fonts are used instead of the fonts chosen by a document's author
- Use document-specified fonts, but disable Dynamic Fonts
  - to save time, page fonts are used only when they are available without downloading
- Use document-specified fonts, including Dynamic Fonts
  - page fonts are always used

Setting Language Priorities

Some webpages are available in several languages. If multiple languages are available, Netscape presents these pages in the language you prefer. If you know more than one language, you may specify the languages you wish to see, in order of preference. To set language priorities in Netscape,

go to the "Edit" menu
choose "Preferences"
open the "Navigator" category
click "Languages"
click "Add"
select a language and its code

To reorder the languages in the list, select a language and use the up and down arrow buttons on the window. For a complete list of language codes, go to http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt

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