freeCodeCamp/guide/english/css/fonts/index.md

4.4 KiB

title
Fonts

Fonts

The CSS font properties define the font family, weight, size, variant, line height and style of a text.

Font family

The font family of a text is set by using the font-family property.

It works with a fallback system, meaning if your browser does not support the first font, it tries with the next one and so on. If the name of the font is more than one word it must be surrounded by quotes. Either single quotes (') or double quotes (") can be used.

p {
  font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;   
}

In the above example, "Times New Roman" is the family-name of the font, while "serif" is the generic-name. Generic names are used as a fallback mechanism for preserving style if the family-name is unavailable. A generic name should always be the last item in the list of font family names.

Generic family names are:

  • serif
  • sans-serif
  • monospace
  • cursive
  • fantasy
  • system-ui

Importing a font

In addition to specifying common fonts that are found on most operating systems, custom web fonts can be used as well. To import such a font, copy the font URL from the library and reference it in the HTML. fonts.google.com is a popular place to find fonts to import, but there are many other resources.

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Then you can use the font that you have imported (in this example, Lobster) in your code as normal.

Font style

The font-style property can be used to specify italic text.

This property has 3 values:

  • normal - Text shown normally
  • italic - Text shown in italic
  • oblique - Text shown leaning

italic and oblique both look like the normal font but slanted. The main difference is that italic is a whole other version of the font, slanted at a particular angle and sometimes styled slightly differently. oblique is the original font but with the ability to be slanted at and angle to different degrees.

.normal {
  font-style: normal;
}

.italic {
  font-style: italic;
}

.oblique {
  font-style: oblique;
}

Font size

The font-size property sets the size of the text.

There are different types of font size values:

  • px (pixels) - The default size of text being 16px
  • em - based on the current or inherited font size of an element
  • rem - like em, but based on the base font-size of the document
  • small, medium, large - known as absolute size values
  • % - percentages
.with-pixels {
  font-size: 14px;
}

.with-ems {
  font-size: 0.875em;
}

.with-absolute {
  font-size: large;
}

.with-percentage {
  font-size: 80%;
}

For more on these units, visit the MDN reference on CSS Values and Units

Font weight

The font-weightproperty specifies the weight (or boldness) of the font. Accepts keywords (bold, normal, bolder, lighter) or numeric keywords (100, 200, 300, 400 etc.) 400 is the same as normal.

p {
  font-weight: bold;
}

Font responsiveness

The text size can be set with a vw (viewport width) unit. This will allow the text to adjust to the size of the browser window.

<h1 style="font-size: 10vw">Hello World</h1>

Viewport is the browser window size. 1vw = 1% of viewport width. If the viewport is 50cm wide, 1vw is 0.5cm.

Font variant

The font-variant property specifies if text should be displayed using small capitals. When the value small-caps is used, all lowercase letters in the text are converted to uppercase letters while appearing in a smaller font-size than the original uppercase letters.

p.small {
  font-variant: small-caps;
}

Font shorthand property

Font properties can be specified with the shorthand property font. It takes as values (in this order):

  • font-style (optional)
  • font-variant (optional)
  • font-weight (optional)
  • font-size (mandatory)
  • line-height (optional)
  • font-family (mandatory)
p {
  font: italic small-caps 800 20px/1.5 Arial;
}

More Information: