CSS Fonts
The CSS font properties define the font family, boldness, size, and style of a text.
In CSS, there are two types of font family names:
- Generic Family – a group of font families with a similar look (like “Serif” or “Monospace”)
- Font Family – a specific font family (like “Times New Roman” or “Arial”)
Font Family
The font family of a text is set with the font-family property. The font-family property should hold several font names as a “fallback” system. If the browser does not support the first font, it tries the next font, and so on. Start with the font you want, and end with a generic family, to let the browser pick a similar font in the generic family if no other fonts are available.
Note: If the name of a font family is more than one word, it must be in quotation marks, like: “Times New Roman”. More than one font family is specified in a comma-separated list:
CSS Fonts Example
CSS Font Style
The font-style property is mostly used to specify italic text.
This property has three values:
- normal – The text is shown normally
- italic – The text is shown in italics
- oblique – The text is “leaning” (oblique is very similar to italic, but less supported)
CSS Font Style Example
CSS Font Size
The font-size property sets the size of the text.
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 <h1> – <h6> for headings and <p> for paragraphs.
The font-size value can be an absolute, or relative size.
Absolute 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
Relative size:
- 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:
Set Font Size With em
To allow users to resize the text (in the browser menu), many developers use em instead of pixels. The em size unit is recommended by the W3C. 1em is equal to the current font size. The default text size in browsers is 16px. So, the default size of 1em is 16px.
Note: The size can be calculated from pixels to em using this formula: pixels/16=em.
CSS Font Weight
The font-weight the property specifies the weight of a font:
CSS Font Variant
The font-variant property specifies whether or not a text should be displayed in a small-caps font.
In a small-caps font, all lowercase letters are converted to uppercase letters. However, the converted uppercase letters appear in smaller font sizes than the original uppercase letters in the text.
CSS Text Lineheight
The line-height property is used to specify the space between lines:
CSS Box with Line-height
CSS Font Style Task 1
CSS Font Style Task 2
CSS Font Style Task 3
