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CSS ( Cascading Style Sheet )

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Fonts and Text 

Fonts

Finally some real control over fonts, yipee!! There are 5 font properties, and 1 shorthand:

  • font-family
  • font-style
  • font-variant
  • font-weight
  • font-size
  • font (shorthand)
font-family
The font-family property specifies what font will be used, ie. Courier, Helvetica, Arial, etc... or if not available what general family to be used: serif, sans-serif, monospace.

The fonts are listed in preferred order. One nice thing about listing numerous fonts, is that a character which may not be available in one font will try to be extracted out of the next one listed.

Examples:
 

BODY { font-family: Times, TimesRoman, serif }
P { font-family: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif }
H1 { font-family: Monaco, Courier, monospace }
 

Other generic font families that can be used are cursive and fantasy. The generic font families above are serif, sans-serif and monospace. If your font has more than one word use quotes.

.comix { font-family: "Comic Sans MS", sans-serif }
font-style
Valid values for font-style are normal, italic, and oblique. Very straight forward, oblique is similar to italic.

font-variant
Valid values for font-variant are normal and small-caps. Small caps displays the lowercase letters as scaled down uppercase letters.

font-weight
This property specifies what you want the font to weigh, ex. 50 lbs of pure Courier. Well not exactly, the weight of the font is the boldness, or lightness of the font. The valid values that you can assign font-weight are:
normal, bold, bolder, lighter
and 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900
 

Note: normal=400, bold=700

font-size
You guessed it, this specifys the size of the font. There are 5 different ways you can specify the font size. In no particular order, here they are:

absolute size:
point size: ie. 7pt, 22pt, 14pt, 36pt, 72pt, ...
pixel size: ie. 100px, 45px, 90px, 10px, ...

relative size:
key words: xx-small, x-small, small,
medium, large, x-large, xx-large
percentage: 24%, 58%, 150%, 10%, 100%, ...
ems: .24em, .58em, 1.5em, .1em, 1.0em, ...
 

For font-size, ems are equivalent to percentages. Also you only put in the values for the size you want, do not specify the descriptive words absolute size, point size, etc...

Pixel sizing is not recommended by Netscape. The relative sizes are relative to the parent element. For example, if a base font size is set in the BODY, then the the relative sizing is relative to that base font size.

font
Font is a shorthand notation to keep our sheets a little cleaner and neater. The order of the shorthand is 'font-style' 'font-variant' 'font-weight' 'font-size' 'font-family' Also keeping with normal typographical syntax, you can specify the leading, or line-height along with the font-size by using font-size/line-height.

 

Examples:

H1 { font: bolder 72pt Impact, "New SchoolBook", sans-serif }
H2 { font: 700 36pt/48pt Monaco, Courier, monospace }
H5 { font: lighter 12pt Times, TimesRoman, serif }
 

Text

There are 5 text properties that you can specify:
  • word-spacing
  • letter-spacing
  • text-decoration
  • vertical-align
  • text-transform
  • text-align
  • text-indent
  • line-height
letter-spacing and word-spacing
Exactly how it sounds this specify the spacing between letters and words. The valid values are length values, such as em, px, pt, %,...

 

Examples:

P { word-spacing: 0.75em; letter-spacing: 10px; }

 

text-decoration
The text-decoration values you can assign to it are: normal, underline, overline, line-through, and blink (blech!!) Each one is fairly self explanatory.

vertical-align
Valid values are: baseline, sub, super, top, text-top, middle, bottom, text-bottom.

I am not exactly sure the minute differences between all of these, play around with different alignments and see what does what.

text-transform
I think this property is one of the neater properties that I probably will never use. The property can transform the text to all uppercase, all lowercase, and capitalized. The valid values are: none, capitalize, uppercase, lowercase.

I'll probably never use them, because I would just type the text how I want it, and wouldn't need a style sheet to control it, but it may be useful somehow.

text-align
This probably should have been called horizontal-align, since they have a vertical align, but my guess is that that is to hard to spell and type in numerous times. Valid values for text-align are: left, right, center, and justify.

text-indent
Indented a paragraph, what a concept. Valid values are length and percentages. This property will indent the first line in a paragraph, the sepecified length or percentage.

 

Examples:

.indent1 { text-indent: 1.0em; }

.indent2 { text-indent: 30px; }
 



line-height
This allows you specify the height of a line, which will allow you to specify the distance between two lines. I found this a little tricker to use, it does not work well as an inline property, I found as a paragraph property works pretty good.

Valid values are: length and percentages, negative values are not allowed.

 

Example:

P.listi { line-height: 80%; }