ARTICLE FOCUS: So many people have asked how to create a fancy sig file as well as just create bold, italic and other emphasis in their posts. Kathlyn Lindeboom, the Creative COW's director demonstrates various ways to use standard html tags to create all the fresh whipped cream with chocolate sprinkles you want to.

Many of the Cow's regular members have their own styles when posting to their favorite forums. They tweak text characters, fonts, colors, size and many other things to add flair to their posts. They also hide their links and make words live links just as if you were in their website. How do they do it??? Here's how to become a web guru and add all the calories you wabt to your own posts here at the Cow...

Want to say something bold and big???
Type in your your sentence with the following tags surrounding it. So it would be like this:

<b><font size="4">Want to say something bold and big???</font></b>

Font sizes are 3=Normal, 4=Larger, 5=Larger Still, 6=Very Large, 7=Largest

NOTE: Don't forget the closing tags </font> and </b> or everything below your post on the posts page will be a mess!

Want to emphasize a point with italics?

Just place the html tags <i>italics</i> around your word or phrase.

Want to make a big green smiley face? Like this? :o)
<FONT SIZE="7" color="green">:o)</FONT>

Maybe you'd like to post a live link.

If so you might want to post something like: Please visit the Adobe Premiere COW forum.

Well to get it to be a live link like that seen just above, you have to type:

Please visit the <a href="http://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/select_forum.cgi?forum=adobe_premiere" target="_top">Adobe Premiere COW forum</a>.

Note the beginning and ending tags, as well as the target="_top", which is the command that forces the browser to blow out whatever is in the existing browser window and show your new linked address instead. If you want to leave the existing location but want a new window to open on top of the existing window, then use the target="_blank" command. That will open a new window that they can close when they're done.

Well, here are some of the some of the more common things you may want to do. So go to the HTML User Embed Test COW and try it out.

Oh, one more thing...

Please don't try to get fancy with the subject line. Please keep your embeds to the body of your post *and* don't forget the closing tags!

:o)