font-weight

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-weight
 
The font-weight CSS descriptor allows authors to specify font weights for the fonts specified in the @font-face at-rule. The font-weight property can separately be used to set how thick or thin characters in text should be displayed.
 
For a particular font family, authors can download various font faces which correspond to the different styles of the same font family, and then use the font-weight descriptor to explicitly specify the font face's weights. The values for the CSS descriptor is same as that of its corresponding font property.
 
There are generally limited weights available for a particular font family. When a specified weight doesn't exist, a nearby weight is used. Fonts lacking bold typeface are often synthesized by the user agent. To prevent this, use the font-synthesis shorthand property.
 
Syntax
 
/* Single values */ font-weight: normal; font-weight: bold; font-weight: 400; /* Multiple Values */ font-weight: normal bold; font-weight: 300 500; 
 
The font-weight property is described using any one of the values listed below.
 
Values
 
Normal font weight. Same as 400 .
 
Bold font weight. Same as 700 .
 
In earlier versions of the font-weight specification, the property accepts only keyword values and the numeric values 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, and 900; non-variable fonts can only really make use of these set values, although fine-grained values (e.g. 451) will be translated to one of these values for non-variable fonts.
 
CSS Fonts Level 4 extends the syntax to accept any number between 1 and 1000, inclusive, and introduces Variable fonts, which can make use of this much finer-grained range of font weights.
 
Common weight name mapping
 
The numerical values 100 to 900 roughly correspond to the following common weight names:
 
 
 
Value
 
Common weight name
 
  
 
 
100
 
Thin (Hairline)
 
 
 
200
 
Extra Light (Ultra Light)
 
 
 
300
 
Light
 
 
 
400
 
Normal
 
 
 
500
 
Medium
 
 
 
600
 
Semi Bold (Demi Bold)
 
 
 
700
 
Bold
 
 
 
800
 
Extra Bold (Ultra Bold)
 
 
 
900
 
Black (Heavy)
 
 
 
 
Variable fonts
 
Most fonts have a particular weight which corresponds to one of the numbers in Common weight name mapping. However some fonts, called variable fonts, can support a range of weights with more or less fine granularity, and this can give the designer a much closer degree of control over the chosen weight.
 
For TrueType or OpenType variable fonts, the "wght" variation is used to implement varying weights.
 
Accessibility concerns
 
People experiencing low vision conditions may have difficulty reading text set with a font-weight value of 100 (Thin/Hairline) or 200 (Extra Light), especially if the font has a low contrast color ratio.
 
Formal definition
 
Formal syntax
 
Examples
 
Setting normal font weight in a @font-face rule
 
The following finds a local Open Sans font or imports it, and allows using the font for normal font weights.
 
@font-face  font-family: "Open Sans"; src: local("Open Sans") format("woff2"), url("/fonts/OpenSans-Regular-webfont.woff") format("woff"); font-weight: 400; > 
 
Specifications
 
Browser compatibility
 
BCD tables only load in the browser
 
See also
 
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font-weight
 
Устанавливает насыщенность шрифта. Значение устанавливается от 100 до 900 с шагом 100. Сверхсветлое начертание, которое может отобразить браузер, имеет значение 100, а сверхжирное — 900. Нормальное начертание шрифта (которое установлено по умолчанию) эквивалентно 400, стандартный полужирный текст — значению 700.
 
Синтаксис
 
Значения
 
Насыщенность шрифта задаётся с помощью ключевых слов: bold — полужирное начертание, normal — нормальное начертание. Также допустимо использовать условные единицы от 100 до 900. Значения bolder и lighter изменяют жирность относительно насыщенности родителя, соответственно, в большую и меньшую сторону.
 
HTML5 CSS2.1 IE Cr Op Sa Fx
 
       
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, 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-weight
 
Объектная модель
 [window.]document.getElementById(" elementID ").style.fontWeight 
Браузеры
 
Браузеры обычно не могут адекватно показать требуемую насыщенность шрифта, поэтому переключаются между значениями bold , normal и lighter . На практике же начертание в браузерах обычно ограничено всего двумя вариантами: нормальное начертание и жирное начертание.
 
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