Text and fonts from 30,000 feet

A lot of the CSS properties are dedicated to helping you style your text. Using CSS, you can control typeface, style, color, and even the decorations that are put on your text, and we’re going to cover all these in this chapter. We’ll start by exploring the actual fonts that are used to display your pages. You’ve already seen the font-family property and in this chapter you’re going to learn a lot more about specifying fonts.

Before we dive in, let’s get the 30,000 foot view of some properties you can use to specify and change the look of your fonts. After that, we’ll take the fonts one by one and learn the ins and outs of using each.

Customize the fonts in your pages with the font-family property.

Fonts can have a dramatic effect on your page designs. In CSS, fonts are divided into “font families” from which you can specify the fonts you’d like used in each element of your page. Only certain fonts are commonly installed on most computers, so you need to be careful in your font choices. In this chapter we’ll take you through everything you need to know to specify and make the best use of fonts.