Steve Pugh said:
There are two ways to define the default font size in Windows IE (Mac
IE differs slightly). First, you can pick one of the five preset sizes
(smallest, smaller, medium, larger, largest). Secondly, you can create
a user stylesheet and specify a default size in there. The first
method is very simple but doesn't give you fine control.
The first method isn't as simple as it should and as it was. There used to
be a font size button in the IE's bar of buttons, but in some version it
was removed, so you need to use the View/Font size (or is it Text size?)
menu. The problem is that a font size control button _suggests itself_ to
the user, whereas the command, though simple per se, needs to be _found_ by
the user. - You can still configure IE to have the font size button in the
bar, and should indeed do so e.g. for a IE on a public PC.
The user style sheet method is simpler than it sounds, but the user still
needs to know about, to use the clumsy way of getting to the settings that
make IE use a user style sheet (though it doesn't take that much _time_ to
get there if you use the keyboard) and to find or write a suitable user
style sheet. In the simplest case, the style sheet could be just
body { font-size: 11pt; }
But if you need a substantially larger font size, for example, then you
encounter the problem that e.g. the defaults for heading sizes on IE are
fixed sizes, not relative to the parent element's font size (as they should
be). Thus, you would need to set font size for headings as well, and for
other elements that have their own default sizes on IE.