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Text References

	ASCII Standards... http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html ... another reference: http://www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.htm
	RTF... http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/specs/rtfspec.htm
	Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/
	PDF ... http://www.adobe.com

Text Coding References for HTML

	These are the symbols that you can use in web pages.
	Symbol Table...ISO Latin 1 Character Entities and HTML Escape Sequence Table: http://www.bbsinc.com/symbol.html
	ASCII-ISO 8859-1(Latin-1) with HTML 3.0 Entities Table: http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html
	ISO 8879 Entites: http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8879.html

Basic Font and Text Characteristics

Font Type (Arial, Times New Roman, and literally thousands of others), 2 basic categories of fonts...

	Serif (e.g., Times New Roman)
	San Serif (e.g. Arial)

Biggest issue of font selection is the availability of the font style on the target machine; some programs, such as Acrobat, can carry and install fonts on the fly, others have to be installed manually.

Font color (red, blue, green...)

Font size in points with 72 points per screen inch (note following may be overridden by browser settings).

	8 points
	10 points
	12 points
	18 points
	24 points

Bold (or strong)

Italic (or emphasized)

Underlined -- be careful on web pages can be confused with links.

Super^scriptor Sub_script

Strike~~thru~~

Text structures...

Paragraphs which can be used to contain many sentences and continue across many lines depending on the message. The advantage is compactness. The disadvantage is the run-in nature of information on a computer screen.

Bullets, or unordered lists...

	item, the first
	item, the second
	item, the third

Numbered or sequential lists...

one
two
three

There are also indented paragraphs and other ways to structure text layout.

Tables

A table is a way to organize information by rows and columns. For example:

Row 1 Cell 1	Top Row	Over here
Row 2 Cell 1	Middle of the table	Now you are here!
Row 3 Cell 1	Bottom Row	Down here

The HTML code to create a table is actually quite simple...

<tr>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="33%">Middle of the table</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="33%">Bottom Row</td>

</tr>

</table>

There are some very important things about tables to keep in mind...

	Each row is defined by <tr> and </tr>
	Within each row, a column is defined by <td> and </td>
	The border attribute in the table tag is used to modify the presence and thickness of the bordering lines of the table.
	The width attribute of the table sets the width of the entire table while the width attribute of the columns (in the <td> tagged section) sets the width of individual cells.
	It is critical to use the end tags when creating tables.

A neat trick with tables is the following...

here

middle

right

This was done with the following code...

<tr>

<td width="33%" align="center">middle</td>

<td width="34%" align="center">right</td>

</tr>

</table>

</center>

The border attribute value (0) in the <table> creates an "invisible" border. Note the use of the <center> tag to center a table that is only 80% of the page.

You can also put pictures in a table...

This is the text beside it...

The code for this example is here...

<tr>

This is the text beside it...

</td>

</tr>

</table>

This example illustrates how you can place text and pictures with much more freedom than normally found with text formatting and image tags.

Using Text on Web Pages

Text is often the bulk of the "hard" information on a web site.
Use fonts that are generally available (Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Windows True Type)
Generally speaking, san serif fonts such as Arial are best.
Use bullets/numbered lists to organize and present (easier to read than paragraphs), also...
Use columns to organize text information.
Use bolding for effect, but avoid constant bolding.
Avoid underlining (causes confusion with links).
Avoid excessive color use.
Spread the text out, use white space to separate.
Black on white is best, use contrast of text to background wisely.
Be aware of your audience, use larger/smaller fonts as necessary (that's why they invented scroll bars).
Art is good, understanding is better.

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