The default text display for a retrieved document in Westlaw.

With a settings file on my browser, however, I was able to override the text style and replace it with the style of my choice.

Style sheets (CSS) let Web designers specify the details of how pages are presented in a browser.  Ordinarily, only site creators use CSS, and people browsing sites view the pages as they were designed.  However, most of the popular recent browsers support “user styles” (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari) that let you define rules to override web authors’ CSS.

The key to using a user style is knowing what CSS rules to write.  Fortunately, Westlaw’s result pages use a consistent and unique structure that gives us an easy target.  Without getting too deep into CSS details, it’s enough to note that all of the body text in a Westlaw page is inside of a tag with the ID mDocumentText_ctl00_mContainer.  It’s then simple to write rules that target only that part of Westlaw. Here is my user style sheet:

#mDocumentText_ctl00_mContainer {
line-height: 150% !important;
text-align: justify !important;
margin-left: 2em !important;
margin-right: 2em !important;
}

#mDocumentText_ctl00_mContainer * {
font-family: "Times New Roman" !important;
font-size: 14px !important;
}

#mDocumentText_ctl00_mContainer a[href*="FNF"]{
position: relative !important;
top: -0.5em !important;
font-size: 70% !important;
}

This does three things.  First, it sets 1.5 line spacing, justified alignment, and comfortable margins for the entire result document.  Second, it forces the font to 14-point Times New Roman for any child of the “container” element.  The third one is a little more clever.  In Westlaw, all hyperlinks to footnotes target anchors on the same page that start “FNF”.  The third selector targets any link that matches “FNF” and makes it superscripted, looking more like a footnote marker and less like computer garbage in the middle of the text.

Westlaw with my user styles active.

In a later post, I’ll share some of the more easy-to-fix settings that make Westlaw even less of a headache to deal with.