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; >CSS Web Fonts
Web fonts allow Web designers to use fonts that are not installed on the user's computer.
When you have found/bought the font you wish to use, just include the font file on your web server, and it will be automatically downloaded to the user when needed.
Your "own" fonts are defined within the CSS @font-face rule.
Different Font Formats
TrueType Fonts (TTF)
TrueType is a font standard developed in the late 1980s, by Apple and Microsoft. TrueType is the most common font format for both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
OpenType Fonts (OTF)
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on TrueType, and is a registered trademark of Microsoft. OpenType fonts are used commonly today on the major computer platforms.
The Web Open Font Format (WOFF)
WOFF is a font format for use in web pages. It was developed in 2009, and is now a W3C Recommendation. WOFF is essentially OpenType or TrueType with compression and additional metadata. The goal is to support font distribution from a server to a client over a network with bandwidth constraints.
The Web Open Font Format (WOFF 2.0)
TrueType/OpenType font that provides better compression than WOFF 1.0.
SVG Fonts/Shapes
SVG fonts allow SVG to be used as glyphs when displaying text. The SVG 1.1 specification define a font module that allows the creation of fonts within an SVG document. You can also apply CSS to SVG documents, and the @font-face rule can be applied to text in SVG documents.
Embedded OpenType Fonts (EOT)
EOT fonts are a compact form of OpenType fonts designed by Microsoft for use as embedded fonts on web pages.
Browser Support for Font Formats
The numbers in the table specifies the first browser version that fully supports the font format.
| Font format | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TTF/OTF | 9.0* | 4.0 | 3.5 | 3.1 | 10.0 |
| WOFF | 9.0 | 5.0 | 3.6 | 5.1 | 11.1 |
| WOFF2 | 14.0 | 36.0 | 39.0 | 10.0 | 26.0 |
| SVG | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported | 3.2 | Not supported |
| EOT | 6.0 | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported | Not supported |
*IE: The font format only works when set to be "installable".
Using The Font You Want
In the @font-face rule; first define a name for the font (e.g. myFirstFont) and then point to the font file.
Tip: Always use lowercase letters for the font URL. Uppercase letters can give unexpected results in IE.
To use the font for an HTML element, refer to the name of the font (myFirstFont) through the font-family property:
Example
@font-face <
font-family: myFirstFont;
src: url(sansation_light.woff);
>
div font-family: myFirstFont;
>
Using Bold Text
You must add another @font-face rule containing descriptors for bold text:
Example
The file "sansation_bold.woff" is another font file, that contains the bold characters for the Sansation font.
Browsers will use this whenever a piece of text with the font-family "myFirstFont" should render as bold.
This way you can have many @font-face rules for the same font.
CSS Font Descriptors
The following table lists all the font descriptors that can be defined inside the @font-face rule:
| Descriptor | Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| font-family | name | Required. Defines a name for the font |
| src | URL | Required. Defines the URL of the font file |
| font-stretch | normal condensed ultra-condensed extra-condensed semi-condensed expanded semi-expanded extra-expanded ultra-expanded | Optional. Defines how the font should be stretched. Default is "normal" |
| font-style | normal italic oblique | Optional. Defines how the font should be styled. Default is "normal" |
| font-weight | normal bold 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 | Optional. Defines the boldness of the font. Default is "normal" |
| unicode-range | unicode-range | Optional. Defines the range of UNICODE characters the font supports. Default is "U+0-10FFFF" |