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Learn CSS styling Text for web development and fundamentals of text styling including setting font, boldness, italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows, styling lists and links, and applying custom fonts to the webpage and other text features.

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Handling different text directions

Many of the properties and values that we have encountered so far in our CSS learning have been tied to the physical dimensions of our screen. We create borders on the top, right, bottom, and left of a box, for example. These physical dimensions map very neatly to content that is viewed horizontally, and by default the web tends to support left-to-right languages (e.g. English or French) better than right-to-left languages (such as Arabic).

In recent years however, CSS has evolved in order to better support different directionality of content, including right-to-left but also top-to-bottom content (such as Japanese) — these different directionalities are called writing modes . As you progress in your study and begin to work with layout, an understanding of writing modes will be very helpful to you, therefore we will introduce them now.

Prerequisites: Basic software installed , basic knowledge of working with files , HTML basics (study Introduction to HTML ), and an idea of how CSS works (study CSS first steps .)
Objective: To understand the importance of writing modes to modern CSS.

What are writing modes?

A writing mode in CSS refers to whether the text is running horizontally or vertically. The writing-mode property lets us switch from one writing mode to another. You don't need to be working in a language which uses a vertical writing mode to want to do this — you could also change the writing mode of parts of your layout for creative purposes.

In the example below we have a heading displayed using writing-mode: vertical-rl . The text now runs vertically. Vertical text is common in graphic design, and can be a way to add a more interesting look and feel to your web design.

The three possible values for the writing-mode property are:

  • horizontal-tb : Top-to-bottom block flow direction. Sentences run horizontally.
  • vertical-rl : Right-to-left block flow direction. Sentences run vertically.
  • vertical-lr : Left-to-right block flow direction. Sentences run vertically.

So the writing-mode property is in reality setting the direction in which block-level elements are displayed on the page — either from top-to-bottom, right-to-left, or left-to-right. This then dictates the direction text flows in sentences.

Writing modes and block and inline layout

We have already discussed block and inline layout , and the fact that some things display as block elements and others as inline elements. As we have seen described above, block and inline is tied to the writing mode of the document, and not the physical screen. Blocks are only displayed from the top to the bottom of the page if you are using a writing mode that displays text horizontally, such as English.

If we look at an example this will become clearer. In this next example I have two boxes that contain a heading and a paragraph. The first uses writing-mode: horizontal-tb , a writing mode that is written horizontally and from the top of the page to the bottom. The second uses writing-mode: vertical-rl ; this is a writing mode that is written vertically and from right to left.

When we switch the writing mode, we are changing which direction is block and which is inline. In a horizontal-tb writing mode the block direction runs from top to bottom; in a vertical-rl writing mode the block direction runs right-to-left horizontally. So the block dimension is always the direction blocks are displayed on the page in the writing mode in use. The inline dimension is always the direction a sentence flows.

This figure shows the two dimensions when in a horizontal writing mode. Showing the block and inline axis for a horizontal writing mode.

This figure shows the two dimensions in a vertical writing mode.

Showing the block and inline axis for a vertical writing mode.

Once you start to look at CSS layout, and in particular the newer layout methods, this idea of block and inline becomes very important. We will revisit it later on.

Direction

In addition to writing mode we also have text direction. As mentioned above, some languages such as Arabic are written horizontally, but right-to-left. This is not something you are likely to use in a creative sense — if you want to line something up on the right there are other ways to do so — however it is important to understand this as part of the nature of CSS. The web is not just for languages that are displayed left-to-right!

Due to the fact that writing mode and direction of text can change, newer CSS layout methods do not refer to left and right, and top and bottom. Instead they will talk about start and end along with this idea of inline and block. Don't worry too much about that right now, but keep these ideas in mind as you start to look at layout; you will find it really helpful in your understanding of CSS.

Logical properties and values

The reason to talk about writing modes and direction at this point in your learning is that we have already looked at a lot of properties that are tied to the physical dimensions of the screen, and these make more sense when in a horizontal writing mode.

Let's take a look at our two boxes again — one with a horizontal-tb writing mode and one with vertical-rl . I have given both of these boxes a width . You can see that when the box is in the vertical writing mode, it still has a width, and this is causing the text to overflow.

What we really want in this scenario is to essentially swap height with width in accordance to the writing mode. When we're in a vertical writing mode we want the box to expand in the block dimension just like it does in the horizontal mode.

To make this easier, CSS has recently developed a set of mapped properties. These essentially replace physical properties — things like width and height — with logical , or flow relative versions.

The property mapped to width when in a horizontal writing mode is called inline-size — it refers to the size in the inline dimension. The property for height is named block-size and is the size in the block dimension. You can see how this works in the example below where we have replaced width with inline-size .

Logical margin, border, and padding properties

In the last two lessons we have learned about the CSS box model, and CSS borders. In the margin, border, and padding properties you will find many instances of physical properties, for example margin-top , padding-left , and border-bottom . In the same way that we have mappings for width and height there are mappings for these properties.

The margin-top property is mapped to margin-block-start — this will always refer to the margin at the start of the block dimension.

The padding-left property maps to padding-inline-start , the padding that is applied to the start of the inline direction. This will be where sentences start in that writing mode. The border-bottom property maps to border-block-end , which is the border at the end of the block dimension.

You can see a comparison between physical and logical properties below.

If you change the writing mode of the boxes by switching the writing-mode property on .box to vertical-rl , you will see how the physical properties stay tied to their physical direction, whereas the logical properties switch with the writing mode.

You can also see that the h2 has a black border-bottom . Can you work out how to make that bottom border always go below the text in both writing modes?

There are a huge number of properties when you consider all of the individual border longhands, and you can see all of the mapped properties on the datarist page for Logical Properties and Values .

Logical values

We have so far looked at logical property names. There are also some properties that take physical values of top , right , bottom , and left . These values also have mappings, to logical values — block-start , inline-end , block-end , and inline-start .

For example, you can float an image left to cause text to wrap round the image. You could replace left with inline-start as shown in the example below.

Change the writing mode on this example to vertical-rl to see what happens to the image. Change inline-start to inline-end to change the float.

Here we are also using logical margin values to ensure the margin is in the correct place no matter what the writing mode is.

Should you use physical or logical properties?

The logical properties and values are newer than their physical equivalents, and therefore have only recently been implemented in browsers. You can check any property page on datarist to see how far back the browser support goes. If you are not using multiple writing modes, then for now you might prefer to use the physical versions. However, ultimately we expect that people will transition to the logical versions for most things, as they make a lot of sense once you also start dealing with layout methods such as flexbox and grid.

Test your skills!

You've reached the end of this article, but can you remember the most important information? You can find some further tests to verify that you've retained this information before you move on — see Test your skills: Writing modes and logical properties .

Summary

The concepts explained in this lesson are becoming increasingly important in CSS. An understanding of the block and inline direction — and how text flow changes with a change in writing mode — will be very useful going forward. It will help you in understanding CSS even if you never use a writing mode other than a horizontal one.

In the next article, we'll take a good look at overflow in CSS.

CSS styling text

With the basics of the CSS language covered, the next CSS topic for you to concentrate on is styling text — one of the most common things you'll do with CSS. Here we look at text styling fundamentals including setting font, boldness, italics, line and letter spacing, drop shadows, and other text features. We round off the module by looking at applying custom fonts to your page, and styling lists and links.

Prerequisites

Before starting this module, you should already have basic familiarity with HTML, as discussed in the Introduction to HTML module, and be comfortable with CSS fundamentals, as discussed in Introduction to CSS .

Note: If you are working on a computer/tablet/other device where you don't have the ability to create your own files, you could try out (most of) the code examples in an online coding program such as JSBin or Glitch .

Guides

This module contains the following articles, which will teach you all of the essentials behind styling HTML text content.

Fundamental text and font styling

In this article we go through all the basics 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.

Styling lists

Lists behave like any other text for the most part, but there are some CSS properties specific to lists that you need to know about, and some best practices to consider. This article explains all.

When styling links, it is important to understand how to make use of pseudo-classes to style link states effectively, and how to style links for use in common varied interface features such as navigation menus and tabs. We'll look at all these topics in this article.

Web fonts

Here we will explore web fonts in detail — these allow you to download custom fonts along with your web page, to allow for more varied, custom text styling.

Assessments

The following assessment will test your understanding of the text styling techniques covered in the guides above.

Typesetting a community school homepage

In this assessment we'll test your understanding of styling text by getting you to style the text for a community school's homepage.

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: 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?

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 <br > 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 <span > or <strong > ), 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:

html 
                                        
                                            
                                                
                                                    <
                                                    h1
                                                
                                                >
                                            
                                            Tommy the cat
                                            
                                                
                                                    </
                                                    h1
                                                
                                                >
                                            
                                            
                                                
                                                    <
                                                    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
                                                
                                                >

You can find the finished example on GitHub (see also the source code ).

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:

css 
                                        
                                            p
                                            {
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            }

This will cause the paragraphs to become red, rather than the standard browser default of black, like so:

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:

css 
                                        
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Arial;
                                            }

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:

Term Definition Example
serif Fonts that have serifs (the flourishes and other small details you see at the ends of the strokes in some typefaces).
sans-serif Fonts that don't have serifs.
monospace Fonts where every character has the same width, typically used in code listings.
cursive Fonts that are intended to emulate handwriting, with flowing, connected strokes.
fantasy Fonts that are intended to be decorative.

Font stacks

Since you can't guarantee the availability of the fonts you want to use on your webpages (even a web font could fail for some reason), you can supply a font stack so that the browser has multiple fonts it can choose from. This involves a font-family value consisting of multiple font names separated by commas, e.g.,

css 
                                        
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            "Trebuchet MS"
                                            ,
                                            Verdana,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            }

In such a case, the browser starts at the beginning of the list and looks to see if that font is available on the machine. If it is, it applies that font to the selected elements. If not, it moves on to the next font, and so on.

It is a good idea to provide a suitable generic font name at the end of the stack so that if none of the listed fonts are available, the browser can at least provide something approximately suitable. To emphasize this point, paragraphs are given the browser's default serif font if no other option is available — which is usually Times New Roman — this is no good for a sans-serif font!

Note: While you can use font family names that contain a space, such as Trebuchet MS , without quoting the name, to avoid mistakes in escaping, it is recommended to quote font family names that contain white space, digits, or punctuation characters other than hyphens.

Warning: Any font family name which could be misinterpreted as a generic family name or a CSS-wide keyword must be quoted. While the font-family names can be included as a <custom-ident > or a <string > , font family names that happen to be the same as a CSS-wide property value, like initial , or inherit , or CSS have the same name as one to the generic font family names, like sans-serif or fantasy , must be included as a quoted string. Otherwise, the font family name will be interpreted as being the equivalent CSS keyword or generic family name. When used as keywords, the generic font family names —serif , sans-serif , monospace , cursive , and fantasy — and the global CSS keywords MUST NOT be quoted, as strings are not interpreted as CSS keywords.

A font-family example

Let's add to our previous example, giving the paragraphs a sans-serif font:

css 
                                        
                                            p
                                            {
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            }

This gives us the following result:

Font size

In our previous module's CSS values and units article, we reviewed length and size units. Font size (set with the font-size property) can take values measured in most of these units (and others, such as percentages ); however, the most common units you'll use to size text are:

  • px (pixels): The number of pixels high you want the text to be. This is an absolute unit — it results in the same final computed value for the font on the page in pretty much any situation.
  • em s: 1 em is equal to the font size set on the parent element of the current element we are styling (more specifically, the width of a capital letter M contained inside the parent element). This can become tricky to work out if you have a lot of nested elements with different font sizes set, but it is doable, as you'll see below. Why bother? It is quite natural once you get used to it, and you can use em to size everything, not just text. You can have an entire website sized using em , which makes maintenance easy.
  • rem s: These work just like em , except that 1 rem is equal to the font size set on the root element of the document (i.e. <html > ), not the parent element. This makes doing the maths to work out your font sizes much easier.

The font-size of an element is inherited from that element's parent element. This all starts with the root element of the entire document — <html > — the standard font-size of which is set to 16px across browsers. Any paragraph (or another element that doesn't have a different size set by the browser) inside the root element will have a final size of 16px . Other elements may have different default sizes. For example, an h1 element has a size of 2em set by default, so it will have a final size of 32px .

Things become more tricky when you start altering the font size of nested elements. For example, if you had an <article > element in your page, and set its font-size to 1.5 em (which would compute to 24 px final size), and then wanted the paragraphs inside the <article > elements to have a computed font size of 20 px , what em value would you use?

html 
                                        
                                            <!-- document base font-size is 16px -->
                                            
                                                
                                                    <
                                                    article
                                                
                                                >
                                            
                                            <!-- If my font-size is 1.5em -->
                                            
                                                
                                                    <
                                                    p
                                                
                                                >
                                            
                                            My paragraph
                                            
                                                
                                                    </
                                                    p
                                                
                                                >
                                            
                                            <!-- How do I compute to 20px font-size? -->
                                            
                                                
                                                    </
                                                    article
                                                
                                                >

You would need to set its em value to 20/24, or 0.83333333 em . The maths can be complicated, so you need to be careful about how you style things. It is best to use rem where you can to keep things simple, and avoid setting the font-size of container elements where possible.

Font style, font weight, text transform, and text decoration

CSS provides four common properties to alter the visual weight/emphasis of text:

  • font-style : Used to turn italic text on or off. Possible values are as follows (you'll rarely use this, unless you want to turn some italic styling off for some reason):
    • normal : Sets the text to the normal font (turns existing italics off).
    • italic : Sets the text to use the italic version of the font, if available; if not, it will simulate italics with oblique instead.
    • oblique : Sets the text to use a simulated version of an italic font, created by slanting the normal version.
  • font-weight : Sets how bold the text is. This has many values available in case you have many font variants available (such as -light , -normal , -bold , -extrabold , -black , etc.), but realistically you'll rarely use any of them except for normal and bold :
    • normal , bold : Normal and bold font weight.
    • lighter , bolder : Sets the current element's boldness to be one step lighter or heavier than its parent element's boldness.
    • 100 – 900 : Numeric boldness values that provide finer grained control than the above keywords, if needed.
  • text-transform : Allows you to set your font to be transformed. Values include:
    • none : Prevents any transformation.
    • uppercase : Transforms all text to capitals.
    • lowercase : Transforms all text to lower case.
    • capitalize : Transforms all words to have the first letter capitalized.
    • full-width : Transforms all glyphs to be written inside a fixed-width square, similar to a monospace font, allowing aligning of, e.g., Latin characters along with Asian language glyphs (like Chinese, Japanese, Korean).
  • text-decoration : Sets/unsets text decorations on fonts (you'll mainly use this to unset the default underline on links when styling them). Available values are:
    • none : Unsets any text decorations already present.
    • underline : Underlines the text.
    • overline : Gives the text an overline.
    • line-through : Puts a strikethrough over the text.
    You should note that text-decoration can accept multiple values at once if you want to add multiple decorations simultaneously, for example, text-decoration: underline overline . Also note that text-decoration is a shorthand property for text-decoration-line , text-decoration-style , and text-decoration-color . You can use combinations of these property values to create interesting effects, for example: text-decoration: line-through red wavy .

Let's look at adding a couple of these properties to our example:

Our new result is like so:

css 
                                        
                                            html
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            10px;
                                            }
                                            h1
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            5rem;
                                            text-transform
                                            :
                                            capitalize;
                                            }
                                            h1 + p
                                            {
                                            font-weight
                                            :
                                            bold;
                                            }
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            1.5rem;
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            }

Text drop shadows

You can apply drop shadows to your text using the text-shadow property. This takes up to four values, as shown in the example below:

css 
                                        
                                            text-shadow
                                            :
                                            4px 4px 5px red;

The four properties are as follows:

  1. The horizontal offset of the shadow from the original text — this can take most available CSS length and size units , but you'll most commonly use px ; positive values move the shadow right, and negative values left. This value has to be included.
  2. The vertical offset of the shadow from the original text. This behaves similarly to the horizontal offset, except that it moves the shadow up/down, not left/right. This value has to be included.
  3. The blur radius: a higher value means the shadow is dispersed more widely. If this value is not included, it defaults to 0, which means no blur. This can take most available CSS length and size units .
  4. The base color of the shadow, which can take any CSS color unit . If not included, it defaults to currentcolor , i.e. the shadow's color is taken from the element's color property.

Multiple shadows

You can apply multiple shadows to the same text by including multiple shadow values separated by commas, for example:

css 
                                        
                                            h1
                                            {
                                            text-shadow
                                            :
                                            1px 1px 1px red,
                                            2px 2px 1px red;
                                            }

If we applied this to the h1 element in our Tommy The Cat example, we'd end up with this:

Note: You can see more interesting examples of text-shadow usage in the Sitepoint article Moonlighting with CSS text-shadow .

Text layout

With basic font properties out of the way, let's have a look at properties we can use to affect text layout.

Text alignment

The text-align property is used to control how text is aligned within its containing content box. The available values are listed below. They work in pretty much the same way as they do in a regular word processor application:

  • left : Left-justifies the text.
  • right : Right-justifies the text.
  • center : Centers the text.
  • justify : Makes the text spread out, varying the gaps in between the words so that all lines of text are the same width. You need to use this carefully — it can look terrible, especially when applied to a paragraph with lots of long words in it. If you are going to use this, you should also think about using something else along with it, such as hyphens , to break some of the longer words across lines.

If we applied text-align: center; to the h1 in our example, we'd end up with this:

css 
                                        
                                            html
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            10px;
                                            }
                                            h1
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            5rem;
                                            text-transform
                                            :
                                            capitalize;
                                            text-shadow
                                            :
                                            1px 1px 1px red,
                                            2px 2px 1px red;
                                            text-align
                                            :
                                            center;
                                            }
                                            h1 + p
                                            {
                                            font-weight
                                            :
                                            bold;
                                            }
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            1.5rem;
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            }

Line height

The line-height property sets the height of each line of text. This property can not only take most length and size units , but can also take a unitless value, which acts as a multiplier and is generally considered the best option. With a unitless value, the font-size gets multiplied and results in the line-height . Body text generally looks nicer and is easier to read when the lines are spaced apart. The recommended line height is around 1.5 – 2 (double spaced). To set our lines of text to 1.6 times the height of the font, we'd use:

css 
                                        
                                            p
                                            {
                                            line-height
                                            :
                                            1.6;
                                            }

Applying this to the <p > elements in our example would give us this result:

css 
                                        
                                            html
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            10px;
                                            }
                                            h1
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            5rem;
                                            text-transform
                                            :
                                            capitalize;
                                            text-shadow
                                            :
                                            1px 1px 1px red,
                                            2px 2px 1px red;
                                            text-align
                                            :
                                            center;
                                            }
                                            h1 + p
                                            {
                                            font-weight
                                            :
                                            bold;
                                            }
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            1.5rem;
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            line-height
                                            :
                                            1.6;
                                            }

Letter and word spacing

The letter-spacing and word-spacing properties allow you to set the spacing between letters and words in your text. You won't use these very often, but might find a use for them to obtain a specific look, or to improve the legibility of a particularly dense font. They can take most length and size units .

To illustrate, we could apply some word- and letter-spacing to the first line of each <p > element in our HTML sample with:

css 
                                        
                                            p::first-line
                                            {
                                            letter-spacing
                                            :
                                            4px;
                                            word-spacing
                                            :
                                            4px;
                                            }

This renders our HTML as:

css 
                                        
                                            html
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            10px;
                                            }
                                            h1
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            5rem;
                                            text-transform
                                            :
                                            capitalize;
                                            text-shadow
                                            :
                                            1px 1px 1px red,
                                            2px 2px 1px red;
                                            text-align
                                            :
                                            center;
                                            letter-spacing
                                            :
                                            2px;
                                            }
                                            h1 + p
                                            {
                                            font-weight
                                            :
                                            bold;
                                            }
                                            p
                                            {
                                            font-size
                                            :
                                            1.5rem;
                                            color
                                            :
                                            red;
                                            font-family
                                            :
                                            Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;
                                            line-height
                                            :
                                            1.6;
                                            letter-spacing
                                            :
                                            1px;
                                            }

Other properties worth looking at

The above properties give you an idea of how to start styling text on a webpage, but there are many more properties you could use. We just wanted to cover the most important ones here. Once you've become used to using the above, you should also explore the following:

Font styles:

Text layout styles:

  • text-indent : Specify how much horizontal space should be left before the beginning of the first line of the text content.
  • text-overflow : Define how overflowed content that is not displayed is signaled to users.
  • white-space : Define how whitespace and associated line breaks inside the element are handled.
  • word-break : Specify whether to break lines within words.
  • direction : Define the text direction. (This depends on the language and usually it's better to let HTML handle that part as it is tied to the text content.)
  • hyphens : Switch on and off hyphenation for supported languages.
  • line-break : Relax or strengthen line breaking for Asian languages.
  • text-align-last : Define how the last line of a block or a line, right before a forced line break, is aligned.
  • text-orientation : Define the orientation of the text in a line.
  • overflow-wrap : Specify whether or not the browser may break lines within words in order to prevent overflow.
  • writing-mode : Define whether lines of text are laid out horizontally or vertically and the direction in which subsequent lines flow.

Font shorthand

Many font properties can also be set through the shorthand property font . These are written in the following order: font-style , font-variant , font-weight , font-stretch , font-size , line-height , and font-family .

Among all those properties, only font-size and font-family are required when using the font shorthand property.

A forward slash has to be put in between the font-size and line-height properties.

A full example would look like this:

css 
                                        
                                            font
                                            :
                                            italic normal bold normal 3em/1.5 Helvetica,
                                            Arial,
                                            sans-serif;

Active learning: Playing with styling text

In this active learning session we don't have any specific exercises for you to do. We'd just like you to have a good play with some font/text layout properties. See for yourself what you can come up with! You can either do this using offline HTML/CSS files, or enter your code into the live editable example below.

If you make a mistake, you can always reset it using the Reset button.

Summary

We hope you enjoyed playing with text in this article! The next article will provide you with all you need to know about styling HTML lists .

Updated on April 20, 2024 by Datarist.