Text and typography

The CSS Podcast - 036: Text & Typography

Text is one of the core building blocks of the web.

When making a website, you don’t necessarily need to style your text; HTML actually has some pretty reasonable default styling.

However, text will likely make up the majority of your website, so it’s worthwhile to add some styling to spruce it up. By changing a few basic properties, you can significantly improve the reading experience for your users!

In this module, we’ll first look at some fundamental CSS font properties like font-family, font-style, font-weight, and font-size. Then, we’ll dive into properties that affect paragraphs of text, such as text-indent and word-spacing. The module finishes with some more advanced topics such as variable fonts and pseudo-elements.

Change the typeface #

Use font-family to change the typeface of your text.

The font-family property accepts a comma-separated list of strings, either referring to specific or generic font families. Specific font families are quoted strings, such as “Helvetica”, “EB Garamond”, or “Times New Roman”. Generic font families are keywords such as serif, sans-serif, and monospace (find the full list of options on MDN). The browser will display the first available typeface from the provided list.

When using font-family, you should specify at least one generic font family in case the user’s browser doesn’t have your preferred fonts. Generally, the fallback generic font family should be similar to your preferred fonts: if using font-family: "Helvetica" (a sans-serif font family), your fallback should be sans-serif to match.

Use italic and oblique fonts #

Use font-style to set whether text should be italic or not. font-style accepts one of the following keywords: normal, italic, and oblique.

Make text bold #

Use font-weight to set the “boldness” of text. This property accepts keyword values (normal, bold), relative keyword values (lighter, bolder), and numeric values (100 to 900).

The keywords normal and bold are equivalent to the numeric values 400 and 700, respectively.

The keywords lighter and bolder are calculated relative to the parent element. See MDN’s Meaning of Relative Weights for a handy chart showing how this value is determined.

Change the size of text #

Use font-size to control the size of your text elements. This property accepts length values, percentages, and a handful of keyword values.

In addition to length and percentage values, font-size accepts some absolute keyword values (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large) and a couple of relative keyword values (smaller, larger). The relative values are relative to the parent element’s font-size.

Change the space between lines #

Use line-height to specify the height of each line in an element. This property accepts either a number, length, percentage, or the keyword normal. Generally, it’s recommended to use a number instead of a length or percentage to avoid issues with inheritance.

Change the space between characters #

Use letter-spacing to control the amount of horizontal space between characters in your text. This property accepts length values such as em, px, and rem.

Note that the specified value increases the amount of natural space between characters. In the demo below, try selecting an individual letter to see the size of its letterbox and how it changes with letter-spacing.

Change the space between words #

Use word-spacing to increase or decrease the length of space between each word in your text. This property accepts length values such as em, px, and rem. Note that the length you specify is for extra space in addition to the normal spacing. This means that word-spacing: 0 is equivalent to word-spacing: normal.

font shorthand #

You can use the shorthand font property to set many font-related properties at once. The list of possible properties are font-family, font-size, font-stretch, font-style, font-variant, font-weight, and line-height.

Check out MDN’s font article for the specifics of how to order these properties.

Change the case of text #

Use text-transform to modify the capitalization of your text without needing to change the underlying HTML. This property accepts the following keyword values: uppercase, lowercase, and capitalize.

Add underlines, overlines, and through-lines to text #

Use text-decoration to add lines to your text. Underlines are most commonly used, but it’s possible to add lines above your text or right through it!

The text-decoration property is shorthand for the more specific properties detailed below.

The text-decoration-line property accepts the keywords underline, overline, and line-through. You can also specify multiple keywords for multiple lines.

The text-decoration-color property sets the color of all decorations from text-decoration-line.

The text-decoration-style property accepts the keywords solid, double, dotted, dashed, and wavy.

The text-decoration-thickness property accepts any length values and sets the stroke width of all decorations from text-decoration-line.

The text-decoration property is a shorthand for all the above properties.

Add an indent to your text #

Use text-indent to add an indent to your blocks of text. This property takes either a length (for example, 10px, 2em) or a percentage of the containing block’s width.

Deal with overflowing or hidden content #

Use text-overflow to specify how hidden content is represented. There are two options: clip (the default), which truncates the text at the point of overflow; and ellipsis, which displays an ellipsis (…) at the point of overflow.

Control white-space #

The white-space property is used to specify how whitespace in an element should be handled. For more details, check out the white-space article on MDN.

white-space: pre can be useful for rendering ASCII art or carefully indented code blocks.

Control how words break #

Use word-break to change how words should be “broken” when they would overflow the line. By default, the browser will not split words. Using the keyword value break-all for word-break will instruct the browser to break words at individual characters if necessary.

Change text alignment #

Use text-align to specify the horizontal alignment of text in a block or table-cell element. This property accepts the keyword values left, right, start, end, center, justify, and match-parent.

The values left and right align the text to the left and right sides of the block, respectively.

Use start and end to represent the location of the start and end of a line of text in the current writing mode. Therefore, start maps to left in English, and to right in Arabic script which is written right to left (RTL). They're logical alignments, learn more in our logical properties module.

Use center to align the text to the center of the block.

The value of justify organizes the text and changes word spacings automatically so that the text lines up with both the left and right edges of the block.

Change the direction of text #

Use direction to set the direction of your text, either ltr (left to right, the default) or rtl (right to left). Some languages like Arabic, Hebrew, or Persian are written right to left, so direction: rtl should be used. For English and all other left-to-right languages, use direction: ltr.

Change the flow of text #

Use writing-mode to change the way text flows and is arranged. The default is horizontal-tb, but you can also set writing-mode to vertical-lr or vertical-rl for text that you want to flow horizontally.

Change the orientation of text #

Use text-orientation to specify the orientation of characters in your text. The valid values for this property are mixed and upright. This property is only relevant when writing-mode is set to something other than horizontal-tb.

Add a shadow to text #

Use text-shadow to add a shadow to your text. This property expects three lengths (x-offset, y-offset, and blur-radius) and a color.

Check out the text-shadow section of our module on Shadows to learn more.

Variable fonts #

Typically, “normal” fonts require importing different files for different versions of the typeface, e.g. bold, italic, or condensed. Variable fonts are fonts that can contain many different variants of a typeface in one file.

Check out our article on Variable Fonts for more details.

Pseudo-elements #

::first-letter and ::first-line pseudo-elements #

The ::first-letter and ::first-line pseudo-elements target a text element’s first letter and first line respectively.

::selection pseudo-element #

Use the ::selection pseudo-element to change the appearance of user-selected text.

When using this pseudo-element, only certain CSS properties can be used: color, background-color, text-decoration, text-shadow, stroke-color, fill-color, stroke-width.

font-variant #

The font-variant property is a shorthand for a number of CSS properties that let you choose font variants like small-caps and slashed-zero. The CSS properties this shorthand includes are font-variant-alternates, font-variant-caps, font-variant-east-asian, font-variant-ligatures, and font-variant-numeric. Check out the links on each property for more details about its usage.

Resources #

• Font best practices discusses importing fonts, rendering fonts, and other best practices for using fonts on the web.
• MDN Fundamental text and font styling.