<font>
tags are deprecated. Use <span>
instead.
To answer your question: you can remove the attributes using DOMDocument:
$html = '<font color="#ff0000" size="4"> text </font>';
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('font') as $tag) {
$tag->removeAttribute('size');
$tag->removeAttribute('face');
}
echo $dom->saveHTML($tag);
Output:
<font color="#ff0000"> text </font>