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.

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):

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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Размер шрифта HTML
 
Размер шрифта на сайте можно задать как при помощи HTML, так и с помощью CSS. Рассмотрим оба варианта.
 
Задание размера шрифта с помощью HTML
 
Размер шрифта на странице можно определить при помощи тега font HTML. В статье Цвет шрифта HTML мы уже рассматривали тег font и его атрибуты. Одним из атрибутов этого тега является size, который и позволяет установить размер шрифта. Применяется он следующим образом:
 
Конструктор сайтов "Нубекс"
 
Size может принимать значения от 1 до 7 (по умолчанию равен 3, что соответствует 13,5 пунктам для шрифта Times New Roman). Другой вариант задания атрибута – “+1” или “-1”. Это означает, что размер будет изменен относительно базового на 1 пункт больше или меньше, соответственно.
 
Приведенный способ довольно прост в использовании и незаменим при необходимости изменения размера шрифта небольшого куска текста. В остальных случаях рекомендуется определять стиль текста с помощью CSS.
 
Устанавливаем размер шрифта при помощи CSS
 
В CSS для изменения размера шрифта применяется свойство font-size, которое применяется следующим образом:
 
   .nubex 
Шрифты HTML-блока div класса nubex получают размер 14px при помощи свойства font size.
  
 
В приведенном примере размер шрифта устанавливается в пикселях. Но существуют и другие способы задания размера:
 
 
large, small, medium - задают абсолютный размер (маленький, средний, большой). Также могут применяться значения экстра-маленький (x-small, xx-small), экстра-большой (x-large, xx-large).
 
larger, smaller - задают относительный размер (меньше или больше относительно родительского элемента).
 
100% - задается относительный размер (в процентах относительно родительского). Например: 
 
 
5ex - означает, что размер составит 5 высот буквы x от базового шрифта;
 
14pt - 14 пунктов;
 
22px - 22 пикселя;
 
1vw - 1% от ширины окна браузера;
 
1vh - 1% от высоты окна браузера;
 
 
Смотрите также:
 
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HTML Font Size – How to Change Text Size with an HTML Tag
 
 
 Joel Olawanle
 
 
When you add text to your HTML file with an HTML tag, you won't always want the text to remain the default size. You'll want to be able to adjust how the text displays in the browser.
 
In this article, you will learn how to change the text size with an HTML tag.
 
Before you proceed, it is essential to know that there is only one way we can do this: through CSS's font-size property. We can use the font-size property through inline, internal, or external styling.
 
In the past, we could adjust text size within our HTML tag without using CSS. But that was before HTML5. Then we added text using the tag, which can take in an attribute of size as seen below:
 
This size attribute can take in value from 1-7 in which the text size increases from 1 to 7. But like I said, this has long been depreciated, and most people don't even know it existed.
 
In case you are in a rush to see how you can change the size of your text, then here it is:
 
// Using inline CSS 
Hello World!
 // Using internal/external CSS selector
 
Suppose you are not in a rush. Let's briefly dive right in.
 
How to Change Text Size With Inline CSS
 
Inline CSS allows you to apply styles to specific HTML elements. This means we are putting CSS into an HTML tag directly. We use the style attribute, which now holds all our styling.
 
We use the font-size property alongside our value to change the text size using inline CSS. This value can use any of your preferred CSS units such as em, px, rem, and so on.
 
 
Hello World!
 
Any text whose font we want to change
 
 
A perfect syntax would be:
 
How to Change Text Size With Internal or External CSS
 
The approach you use to change text size in internal and external CSS styling is similar, since you use a selector. The general syntax for this is:
 
The selector can either be our HTML tag or maybe a class or an ID. For example:
 
// HTML 
Any text whose font we want to change
 // CSS p
 
// HTML 
Any text whose font we want to change
 // CSS .my-paragraph
 
Wrapping Up
 
In this article, you learned how to change the font/text size of an HTML element using CSS. You also saw how developers did it before the introduction of HTML5.
 
Also, keep in mind that it's always better to style your HTML elements using internal or external styling, as it offers a lot of flexibility compared to inline styling.
 
For example, you can make use of one CSS class for all your p tags rather than having to add inline styles to all your p tag elements.
 
Using inline styles is not considered best practice because it results in a lot of repetition – you cannot reuse the styles elsewhere. To learn more, you can read my article on Inline Style in HTML.
 
I hope this tutorial gives you the knowledge to change the size of your HTML text so you can make it look better.
 
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