font-family

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
 
CSS Fonts
 
Choosing the right font for your website is important!
 
Font Selection is Important
 
Choosing the right font has a huge impact on how the readers experience a website.
 
The right font can create a strong identity for your brand.
 
Using a font that is easy to read is important. The font adds value to your text. It is also important to choose the correct color and text size for the font.
 
Generic Font Families
 
In CSS there are five generic font families:
 
 
Serif fonts have a small stroke at the edges of each letter. They create a sense of formality and elegance.
 
Sans-serif fonts have clean lines (no small strokes attached). They create a modern and minimalistic look.
 
Monospace fonts - here all the letters have the same fixed width. They create a mechanical look.
 
Cursive fonts imitate human handwriting.
 
Fantasy fonts are decorative/playful fonts.
 
 
All the different font names belong to one of the generic font families.
 
Difference Between Serif and Sans-serif Fonts
 
Note: On computer screens, sans-serif fonts are considered easier to read than serif fonts.
 
Some Font Examples
 
 
 
Generic Font Family
 
Examples of Font Names
 
 
 
Serif
 
Times New Roman 
Georgia 
Garamond 
 
 
 
Sans-serif
 
Arial 
Verdana 
Helvetica 
 
 
 
Monospace
 
Courier New 
Lucida Console 
Monaco
 
 
 
Cursive
 
Brush Script MT 
Lucida Handwriting 
 
 
 
Fantasy
 
Copperplate 
Papyrus
 
 
 
The CSS font-family Property
 
In CSS, we use the font-family property to specify the font of a text.
 
Note: If the font name is more than one word, it must be in quotation marks, like: "Times New Roman".
 
Tip: The font-family property should hold several font names as a "fallback" system, to ensure maximum compatibility between browsers/operating systems. Start with the font you want, and end with a generic family (to let the browser pick a similar font in the generic family, if no other fonts are available). The font names should be separated with comma. Read more about fallback fonts in the next chapter.
 
Example
 
Specify some different fonts for three paragraphs:
 
.p1 <
font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
>
 
 
.p2 font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
>
 
.p3 font-family: "Lucida Console", "Courier New", monospace;
>
 
Источник
 
font-family
 
Устанавливает семейство шрифта, которое будет использоваться для оформления текста содержимого. Список шрифтов может включать одно или несколько названий, разделенных запятой. Если в имени шрифта содержатся пробелы, например, Trebuchet MS, оно должно заключаться в одинарные или двойные кавычки.
 
Когда браузер встречает первый шрифт в списке, он проверяет его наличие на компьютере пользователя. Если такого шрифта нет, берется следующее имя из списка и также анализируется на присутствие. Поэтому несколько шрифтов увеличивает вероятность, что хотя бы один из них будет обнаружен на клиентском компьютере. Заканчивают список обычно ключевым словом, которое описывает тип шрифта — serif , sans-serif , cursive , fantasy или monospace . Таким образом, последовательность шрифтов лучше начинать с экзотических типов и заканчивать обобщенным именем, которое задает вид начертания.
 
Синтаксис
 
font-family: имя шрифта [, имя шрифта[, . ]] | inherit
 
Значения
 
Любое количество имен шрифтов разделенных запятыми. Универсальные семейства шрифтов:
 
 
serif — шрифты с засечками (антиквенные), типа Times;
 
sans-serif — рубленные шрифты (шрифты без засечек или гротески), типичный представитель — Arial;
 
cursive — курсивные шрифты;
 
fantasy — декоративные шрифты;
 
monospace — моноширинные шрифты, ширина каждого символа в таком семействе одинакова (шрифт Courier).
 
 
HTML5 CSS2.1 IE Cr Op Sa Fx
 
     h1 < font-family: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; >p 
Duis te feugifacilisi
 
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diem nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut lacreet dolore magna aliguam erat volutpat. Ut wisis enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tution ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
  
 
Результат данного примера показан на рис. 1.
 
 
Рис. 1. Применение свойства font-family
 
Объектная модель
 [window.]document.getElementById(" elementID ").style.fontFamily 
Браузеры
 
Internet Explorer до версии 7.0 включительно не поддерживает значение inherit .
 
Источник