Css font space size

Fundamental text and font styling

In this article we’ll start you on your journey towards mastering text styling with CSS. Here we’ll go through all the basic fundamentals of text/font styling in detail, including setting font weight, family and style, font shorthand, text alignment and other effects, and line and letter spacing.

Prerequisites:	Basic computer literacy, HTML basics (study Introduction to HTML), CSS basics (study Introduction to CSS).
Objective:	To learn the fundamental properties and techniques needed to style text on web pages.

What is involved in styling text in CSS?

If you have worked with HTML or CSS already, e.g., by working through these tutorials in order, then you know that text inside an element is laid out inside the element’s content box. It starts at the top left of the content area (or the top right, in the case of RTL language content), and flows towards the end of the line. Once it reaches the end, it goes down to the next line and flows to the end again. This pattern repeats until all the content has been placed in the box. Text content effectively behaves like a series of inline elements, being laid out on lines adjacent to one another, and not creating line breaks until the end of the line is reached, or unless you force a line break manually using the element.

Note: If the above paragraph leaves you feeling confused, then no matter — go back and review our Box model article to brush up on the box model theory before carrying on.

The CSS properties used to style text generally fall into two categories, which we’ll look at separately in this article:

• Font styles: Properties that affect a text’s font, e.g., which font gets applied, its size, and whether it’s bold, italic, etc.
• Text layout styles: Properties that affect the spacing and other layout features of the text, allowing manipulation of, for example, the space between lines and letters, and how the text is aligned within the content box.

Note: Bear in mind that the text inside an element is all affected as one single entity. You can’t select and style subsections of text unless you wrap them in an appropriate element (such as a or ), or use a text-specific pseudo-element like ::first-letter (selects the first letter of an element’s text), ::first-line (selects the first line of an element’s text), or ::selection (selects the text currently highlighted by the cursor).

Fonts

Let’s move straight on to look at properties for styling fonts. In this example, we’ll apply some CSS properties to the following HTML sample:

h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p> 

Color

The color property sets the color of the foreground content of the selected elements, which is usually the text, but can also include a couple of other things, such as an underline or overline placed on text using the text-decoration property.

color can accept any CSS color unit, for example:

This will cause the paragraphs to become red, rather than the standard browser default of black, like so:

h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p> 

Font families

To set a different font for your text, you use the font-family property — this allows you to specify a font (or list of fonts) for the browser to apply to the selected elements. The browser will only apply a font if it is available on the machine the website is being accessed on; if not, it will just use a browser default font. A simple example looks like so:

This would make all paragraphs on a page adopt the arial font, which is found on any computer.

Web safe fonts

Speaking of font availability, there are only a certain number of fonts that are generally available across all systems and can therefore be used without much worry. These are the so-called web safe fonts.

Most of the time, as web developers we want to have more specific control over the fonts used to display our text content. The problem is to find a way to know which font is available on the computer used to see our web pages. There is no way to know this in every case, but the web safe fonts are known to be available on nearly all instances of the most used operating systems (Windows, macOS, the most common Linux distributions, Android, and iOS).

The list of actual web safe fonts will change as operating systems evolve, but it’s reasonable to consider the following fonts web safe, at least for now (many of them have been popularized thanks to the Microsoft Core fonts for the Web initiative in the late 90s and early 2000s):

Name	Generic type	Notes
Arial	sans-serif	It’s often considered best practice to also add Helvetica as a preferred alternative to Arial as, although their font faces are almost identical, Helvetica is considered to have a nicer shape, even if Arial is more broadly available.
Courier New	monospace	Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Courier New font called Courier. It’s considered best practice to use both with Courier New as the preferred alternative.
Georgia	serif
Times New Roman	serif	Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Times New Roman font called Times. It’s considered best practice to use both with Times New Roman as the preferred alternative.
Trebuchet MS	sans-serif	You should be careful with using this font — it isn’t widely available on mobile OSes.
Verdana	sans-serif

Note: Among various resources, the cssfontstack.com website maintains a list of web safe fonts available on Windows and macOS operating systems, which can help you make your decision about what you consider safe for your usage.

Note: There is a way to download a custom font along with a webpage, to allow you to customize your font usage in any way you want: web fonts. This is a little bit more complex, and we will discuss it in a separate article later on in the module.

Default fonts

CSS defines five generic names for fonts: serif , sans-serif , monospace , cursive , and fantasy . These are very generic and the exact font face used from these generic names can vary between each browser and each operating system that they are displayed on. It represents a worst case scenario where the browser will try its best to provide a font that looks appropriate. serif , sans-serif , and monospace are quite predictable and should provide something reasonable. On the other hand, cursive and fantasy are less predictable and we recommend using them very carefully, testing as you go.

The five names are defined as follows:

body  font-family: sans-serif; >
 
Источник
 
Расстояние между буквами, строками, ширина табуляции в CSS
 
Демонстрация возможностей CSS для настройки расстояний между буквами, строками, табуляции и других свойств шрифтов.
 
 Красная строка 
 
Свойство text-indent устанавливает сдвиг первой строки, цвет первой буквы можно определить свойством :first-letter.
 
 Расстояние между буквами 
 
Свойство letter-spacing устанавливает интервал между символами. В качестве значений принимаются единицы длины (px, in, pt, em, ex), допустимо отрицательное значение. Лучшая точность получается при использовании em.
 
 Ширина пробелов 
 
Word-spacing задает интервал между словами, значение можно указать в px, in, pt, em, ex.
 
 Ширина табуляции 
 
Свойство tab-size устанавливает ширину табуляции в , , и других элементах со свойством white-space: pre . В качестве значения используется количество символов (по умолчанию 8) или единицы длины.
 
Свойство пока ещё не стандартизировано W3C, но поддерживается современными браузерами.
 
 Ширина букв 
 
Свойство font-stretch задаёт ширину символов в шрифте, работает только со шрифтами, у которых есть поддержка разных начертаний. Значения задаются константами или процентами:
 
 
 
 
normal
 
100%
 
Обычная ширина
 
 
 
semi-condensed
 
87.5%
 
Узковатая ширина
 
 
 
condensed
 
75%
 
Узкая ширина
 
 
 
extra-condensed
 
62.5%
 
Очень узкая ширина
 
 
 
ultra-condensed
 
50%
 
Самая узкая ширина
 
 
 
semi-expanded
 
112.5%
 
Широковатая ширина
 
 
 
expanded
 
125%
 
Средне-большая ширина
 
 
 
extra-expanded
 
150%
 
Очень большая ширина
 
 
 
ultra-expanded
 
200%
 
Самая большая ширина
 
 
 
 
Источник
 
letter-spacing
 
The letter-spacing CSS property sets the horizontal spacing behavior between text characters. This value is added to the natural spacing between characters while rendering the text. Positive values of letter-spacing causes characters to spread farther apart, while negative values of letter-spacing bring characters closer together.
 
Try it
 
Syntax
 
/* Keyword value */ letter-spacing: normal; /* values */ letter-spacing: 0.3em; letter-spacing: 3px; letter-spacing: 0.3px; /* Global values */ letter-spacing: inherit; letter-spacing: initial; letter-spacing: revert; letter-spacing: revert-layer; letter-spacing: unset; 
 
Values
 
The normal letter spacing for the current font. Unlike a value of 0 , this keyword allows the user agent to alter the space between characters in order to justify text.
 
Specifies extra inter-character space in addition to the default space between characters. Values may be negative, but there may be implementation-specific limits. User agents may not further increase or decrease the inter-character space in order to justify text.
 
Accessibility concerns
 
A large positive or negative letter-spacing value will make the word(s) the styling is applied to unreadable. For text styled with a very large positive value, the letters will be so far apart that the word(s) will appear like a series of individual, unconnected letters. For text styled with a very large negative value, the letters will overlap each other to the point where the word(s) may be unrecognizable.
 
Legible letter-spacing must be determined on a case-by-case basis, as different font families have different character widths. There is no one value that can ensure all font families automatically maintain their legibility.
 
Internationalization concerns
 
Some written languages should not have any letter spacing applied. For instance, languages that use the Arabic script expect connected letters to remain visually connected, as in the following example. Applying letter spacing will lead the text to look broken.
 
Formal definition
 
 
 
 
Initial value
 
normal
 
 
 
Applies to
 
all elements. It also applies to ::first-letter and ::first-line .
 
 
 
Inherited
 
yes
 
 
 
Computed value
 
an optimum value consisting of either an absolute length or the keyword normal
 
 
 
Animation type
 
a length
 
 
 
 
Источник