The Bold and Italic Commands

The next commands that we will look at are the text manipulation commands. These commands allow you to do almost anything with a HTML document that you can do with a word processor. Using these commands you can make text appear in italics or make text bold. These commands can be useful if you want to put titles of magazine articles, emphasize words, or transfer an essay that you wrote that contains these types of text manipulations already in it on to the internet. Using these commands can provide some flavor to your web page. Looking at a web page that is all text and contains no manipulation of the text seems very boring. If you are looking at a document that is all yet that contains some manipulation it will make a page look more interesting, even if your page is a informative page about the cellular structure of fungus :)

In order to insert text manipulation into your web page you must first decide what text you want the manipulation to occur on. On my page, I put manipulation of words that describe the link in the picture. For example, if you visit my page you will see a list of the sections that you can go to. Each section is signaled by a graphic but if you are not familiar with what was being discussed in the section then you will have no way to know what is in the section without going to it. In order to solve this problem I put the Operating System’s name that the link is going to lead to next to the picture of the Operating System. But how you manipulate the text to spice up your page is up to you and all circumstances are different. Let’s just for example say that on your page you wanted to write a essay on the Oedipus Cycle. In order to be grammatically correct you would want to italize the words Oedipus Cycle because they are the title of a series of books. In order to do this you would first need to insert the signal to begin the italics which is an angle bracket “<“ then the letter I then another angle bracket “>”. Then you would insert the words that you wished to be italized. Then you would insert the command that ends the italics and reverts the text thereafter into normal text. This command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by a I then you would insert an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for this with a little bit of writing before and after the command:

The <I>Oedipus Cycle</I> was written by Sophocles.

The bold command can be used to emphasize words. If a person is skimming your page for important information the bold words will stick out and catch there eye. Let’s say you were talking about all of the people in your family because you have an about the author section on your web page. You want to make the relationship of the people in your family bold but you want there name not to be. This way if the person wants to know about your brother they would be able to skim your document for the word brother. In order to start the bold command you must insert an angle bracket “<“ followed by the letter B followed by an angle bracket “>”. Then you would insert the text that you want to be bold. Then you would end that command with an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by a B then an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for this document would look like:

My <B>Brother</B> is a very successful business man.

Another option is to make items bold and italics at the same time. For example, if you wanted to talk about your favorite book (Which of course is this book :) and you wanted the name to stick out. But, because it is the name of the book it should be italized. The final source code for this would look like this:

My favorite book is <I><B>The Pocket Guide to HTML 3.0</B></I>.

NOTE: It does not matter what order you put multiple commands in, they will still function the same.

The Entity Command

There is another type of text that one can use to make certain symbols on web pages that are normally not used. This type of text is called entities. For example an © would show up as a copyright symbol “©” on the web browser. Inserting these with normal text is easy, all you have to do is enter the entity’s epers and (shift+2) “&” and the text that represents the entity on your page. That is it, no command just enter the entity symbol (there is a list of symbols at the end of the book). The final source code for a copyright sign would look like this:

This page is © Justin Weber

The Font Size Command

Another text manipulation command is the command that can be used to change the size of the the font on your web page. This is useful if you want to put a word on you page that is bigger then the other words but you do not want to make it a heading because you want it to appear in the body of a paragraph. This command is also useful if you want to put credits or a copyright at the bottom of your page that is very small. This technique has even been used to create a word that looks like a mountain, it starts small and gets bigger, or a sort of inverse mountain, it starts big and ends up smaller. Using the font size command you could make the first letter of every paragraph on your page be really big and all the rest of the letters normal size. This would make your page look kind of like a children’s or old fashion book.

In order to incorporate the font size command into your web page you need to decide what size you want the font to be. The font can be in a size from 1 through 7 but unlike the heading 1 is the smallest and 7 is the biggest. If you are going to use normal text on your web page you do not need to have a font size command because the web browser automatically assigns all text without the font size modifier a specific size. The font size modifier would be inserted to a web page by starting the font modification with a command. The command to start the modification would be an angle bracket “<“ followed by the words FONT SIZE followed by a 1-7 (if you want it just slightly larger then the normal font on a web page you would have to guess and insert different numbers into that size until you get your page how you want it to look) then an angle bracket “>”. For now, we will say that we want a small copyright on the bottom of the web page so we will use the smallest font size which is 1. We would then insert the text that we want to have the font manipulation active on. Then when our text is done we will need to insert the command that tells the browser that we no longer want to have our text modified. This command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by the word FONT followed by an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for this page will look like this:

<FONT SIZE=1>This page and it’s contents are copyrighted by the owner</FONT>

Now we can do some fun stuff! If I wanted to make a document with many paragraphs and at the beginning of each paragraph I wanted a really big letter of the first word I could do this:

<FONT SIZE=7>O</FONT>nce upon a time there was a woman that lived in a shoe.

If I wanted to make a the text make the words look like a mountain, or a bell curve, I could change the font size of each letter:

<FONT SIZE=3>J</FONT><FONT SIZE=4>U</FONT><FONT SIZE=5>S</FONT><FONT SIZE=5>T</FONT><FONT SIZE=4>I</FONT><FONT SIZE=3>N</FONT>

Or if I wanted the text to appear as a inverse mountain I could do this:

<FONT SIZE=5>J</FONT><FONT SIZE=4>U</FONT><FONT SIZE=3>S</FONT><FONT SIZE=3>T</FONT><FONT SIZE=4>I</FONT><FONT SIZE=5>N</FONT>

The Font Face Command

Another type of font manipulation that can be used is the command to change the type of font on your web page. For example, if you wanted Times to be on your web page then, before you started you page, you could enter the FONT command with a modifier. This modifier is the word FACE then an equal sign “=” followed by the type of font that you want, Arial, Times, etc. So if you want you web page to be in Times font then you would start the first text of your web page with the command. The final source code of the first word on a web page would look like this:

<FONT FACE=Times>

<H1>Welcome to my web page!</H1>

The Base Font Command

You can also change the default size of the font on the page, which is three. You would do this if you want the font on your page to be bigger or smaller then it is on everyone else's page. In order to do this, before you type any normal text, you must enter the BASEFONT command. The command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by the word BASEFONT followed by the word SIZE followed by an equal sign “=” followed by the size that you want the font to be followed by an angle bracket “>”. The final source code for a document that has the basefont size of 4, one bigger then the default 3, would look like this:

<BASEFONT SIZE=4>

Any text on the page

The Big and Small Commands

Rather then specifying the size of the font, if you want the font bigger or smaller, you can just type a command to make the font big or small in HTML 3.0. For example if you wanted your font bigger you would enter the opening command, then the text that you want enlarged, then the closing command. The starting command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by the word BIG followed by an angle bracket “>”. The closing command is an angle bracket “<“ followed by a slash “/” followed by the word BIG followed by an angle bracket “>”. For example, if you wanted the words Hello on your page to be big you could make the source look like this:

<BIG>Hello</BIG>

The same command is used for small except that the word BIG in both commands is replaced by the word SMALL. For example, if you wanted to have the copyright information on your page small you would plug this into the source:

<SMALL>This page is copyright Justin Weber</SMALL>