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Change default font size in WordPad?

How can I change from the default "10" font size in WordPad to any other size like "12"? I have searched and looked and sought this answer to no avail. I use WordPad quite a lot and even when I manually change the font size it invariably switches back to a "10" in the process of writing, etc. So it is a big pain!

Dave's Answer:

Because WordPad uses defaults set by your overall configuration rather than having its own set of defaults, you can't change the default in WordPad permanently unless you're a serious Windows programming wizard. I really don't think you're gonna want to know that much about your system just for a problem with WordPad. Who does?

However, there is a way to solve your problem by changing the way you are doing things. Here's what I noticed that you said:

"I use WordPad quite a lot and even when I manually change the font size it invariably switches back to a "10" in the process of writing, etc."

The fact that it is switching back means only one thing -- that you are not selecting your entire workspace (all text) before changing the font size to 12.

You can solve the problem of the font size changing back to default by first selecting all text. If no text exists yet, select all by double-clicking within your text area. you should see a thick selection bar instead of a cursor (and that bar should not disappear while you are changing the font size). If there is already text there, select all text by pressing Ctrl + A to make sure you get every active part of the document.

Here is a picture of what you should see. As you can seem the selected area should still appear selected while you are changing the font size.

When there is no text selected, the cursor disappears. This means you have not changed the font size on the entire document, and future changes to the location of your cursor in the document will take you to a location where the font size remained set to 10.

When you select all first, your font size should remain at the chosen setting for the entire time that you are working on the file.

This should work to keep your font size from re-setting while editing your document.

Many thanks to Desi of Words In A Row for help with this question.

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Comments

Well, I was looking around for a way to change the font WordPad uses for text-only editing (as opposed to format-inclusive editing or whatever you want to call it when you have formatting too). See, I edit HTML documents with WordPad, but I would prefer something like Arial over this Courier stuff, and it's something that I can do in Notepad but haven't seen in WordPad yet. Unfortunately, if there's no way to set a default font, then setting a text-only display font other than Courier is probably impossible too. :(

Posted by: green_meklar at May 30, 2007 12:16 PM

the ruler at the top of my wordpad is really small, when i type a line, it only goes upto no.4 on the ruler, about an inch long. ive tried dragging the pointers across but they stop at 4 too, please help me.

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