Help Desk
HOW TO OVERRIDE THE FONT SETTINGS IN SAFARI FOR ALL PAGES
Sometimes web page designers make interesting choices. Why not use tiny, fancy type on a shaded background to make reading a page more…legible? Apple’s built-in Reader View in Safari across all its platforms lets you make short work of hard-to-read type. But you lose most of the formatting, some of the images, and other elements of the page.
Safari for macOS has another trick up its sleeve: custom CSS. Where HTML defines the structure and content of a web page, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the coding that underlies the appearance and formatting, from type sizes to columns and floating boxes. In Safari > Preferences > Advanced, you can select a custom style sheet from the Style Sheet pop-up menu.
You don’t need to know much CSS to have an impact. For example, suppose you like Arial above all other typefaces. A CSS file that contains this single line will change the typeface on all pages to Arial:
Decoded, that says: ‘For an HTML page’s body section, the container for all the stuff you see on a page, set flag says, ‘I don’t care what any other style sheet says – use my parameter.’
