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; >
 
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font-size
 
Определяет размер шрифта элемента. Размер может быть установлен несколькими способами. Набор констант ( xx-small , x-small , small , medium , large , x-large , xx-large ) задает размер, который называется абсолютным. По правде говоря, они не совсем абсолютны, поскольку зависят от настроек браузера и операционной системы.
 
Другой набор констант ( larger , smaller ) устанавливает относительные размеры шрифта. Поскольку размер унаследован от родительского элемента, эти относительные размеры применяются к родительскому элементу, чтобы определить размер шрифта текущего элемента.
 
В конечном итоге, размер шрифта сильно зависит от значения свойства font-size у родителя элемента.
 
Сам размер шрифта определяется как высота от базовой линии до верхней границы кегельной площадки, как показано на рис. 1.
 
 
Синтаксис
 
font-size: абсолютный размер | относительный размер | значение | проценты | inherit
 
Значения
 
Для задания абсолютного размера используются следующие значения: xx-small , x-small , small , medium , large , x-large , xx-large . Их соответствие с размером шрифта в HTML приведено в табл. 1.
 
Табл. 1. Размер шрифта в CSS и HTML 
 
 
CSS
 
xx-small
 
x-small
 
small
 
medium
 
large
 
x-large
 
xx-large
 
 
 
HTML
 
1
 
2
 
3
 
4
 
5
 
6
 
7
 
 
 
Относительный размер шрифта задается значениями larger и smaller .
 
Также разрешается использовать любые допустимые единицы CSS: em (высота шрифта элемента), ex (высота символа х), пункты ( pt ), пикселы ( px ), проценты ( % ) и др. За 100% берется размер шрифта родительского элемента. Отрицательные значения не допускаются.
 
inherit Наследует значение родителя.
 
HTML5 CSS2.1 IE Cr Op Sa Fx
 
       
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. 2. Применение свойства font-size
 
Объектная модель
 [window.]document.getElementById(" elementID ").style.fontSize 
Браузеры
 
Internet Explorer до версии 7.0 включительно не поддерживает значение inherit .
 
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CSS Font Size
 
Being able to manage the text size is important in web design. However, you should not use font size adjustments to make paragraphs look like headings, or headings look like paragraphs.
 
Always use the proper HTML tags, like - for headings and 
 
for paragraphs.
 
The font-size value can be an absolute, or relative size.
 
 
Sets the text to a specified size
 
Does not allow a user to change the text size in all browsers (bad for accessibility reasons)
 
Absolute size is useful when the physical size of the output is known
 
 
 
Sets the size relative to surrounding elements
 
Allows a user to change the text size in browsers
 
 
Note: If you do not specify a font size, the default size for normal text, like paragraphs, is 16px (16px=1em).
 
Set Font Size With Pixels
 
Setting the text size with pixels gives you full control over the text size:
 
Example
 
Tip: If you use pixels, you can still use the zoom tool to resize the entire page.
 
Set Font Size With Em
 
To allow users to resize the text (in the browser menu), many developers use em instead of pixels.
 
1em is equal to the current font size. The default text size in browsers is 16px. So, the default size of 1em is 16px.
 
The size can be calculated from pixels to em using this formula: pixels/16=em
 
Example
 
h2 font-size: 1.875em; /* 30px/16=1.875em */ 
>
 
p font-size: 0.875em; /* 14px/16=0.875em */
>
 
In the example above, the text size in em is the same as the previous example in pixels. However, with the em size, it is possible to adjust the text size in all browsers.
 
Unfortunately, there is still a problem with older versions of Internet Explorer. The text becomes larger than it should when made larger, and smaller than it should when made smaller.
 
Use a Combination of Percent and Em
 
The solution that works in all browsers, is to set a default font-size in percent for the element:
 
Example
 
Our code now works great! It shows the same text size in all browsers, and allows all browsers to zoom or resize the text!
 
Responsive Font Size
 
The text size can be set with a vw unit, which means the "viewport width".
 
That way the text size will follow the size of the browser window:
 
Hello World
 
Resize the browser window to see how the font size scales.
 
Example
 
Hello World
 
Viewport is the browser window size. 1vw = 1% of viewport width. If the viewport is 50cm wide, 1vw is 0.5cm.
 
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