How to Look Up the Font Used on a Webpage
Fonts can work magic when used effectively. When developers create websites, they usually use Cascading Style Sheets to assign different fonts to text. Microsoft includes a free and useful Developer Tool in later versions of Internet Explorer. This tool allows developers to inspect any element on a page. Because the tool can perform this feat, you can also use it to look up the font used by a particular element on a page.
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Instructions
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Launch Developer Tool
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Open Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9 and navigate to a website. Find a few words of text on the page you would like to analyze.
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Click "Tools" on the upper right hand of the screen and locate the "Developer Tools" option in the drop down menu. Click that option to put a check mark by it.
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3
Press "F12." The Developer Tools window opens.
Determine Font
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Click the "HTML" tab at the top of the window. Two panes appear in the window. Locate the text box near the top of the right pane and type a few words from the text you noted.
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Click the magnifying glass icon next to the text box. IE will find that text and display its location in the HTML code in the left pane.
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Click the "Trace styles" button at the top of the right pane. The right pane will display font and other information about your text. You will see the font's color, size and style. The pane also shows "font-family." Font-family displays the names of one or more fonts. For example, you may see the following:
Font-family : "Georgia," "Helvetica," "Arial"
This example shows how developers usually define a font for a text element or a block of HTML code. They place the desired font -- Georgia in this example -- at the beginning of the list. They place additional font names on the list in case a user's computer does not have the desired font installed.
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Write down the names of the fonts in the font-family list, then check to see which fonts are installed on your computer. The first one in the list that is on your computer is the one you are looking at on the webpage.
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Tips & Warnings
The first name in the font-family definition is usually the font that you see on the webpage. However, as mentioned previously, if that font is not on your computer, it cannot display the font. Your browser will attempt to display the second font in the list. It will proceed through the list until it finds a font that exists on your computer. Font-family lists usually do not contain more than two or three fonts.
