PART II

Working with Text

Good-looking, readable text is vital to the success of a website. CSS has a large number of properties devoted to formatting text, giving you control not only over fonts and colors, but also allowing you to adjust the distance between lines, words, and individual letters. For many years, one of the most frustrating aspects of styling text on the Web has been the limited range of fonts considered safe to use because browsers rely on what’s available on the user’s computer. Thankfully, those days are over. You can now embed a wide range of fonts in web pages, either by storing them on your own web server or using a font hosting service.

The CSS3 Text module is still only a working draft. Chapter 4 covers all CSS2.1 text properties and introduces several new ones from CSS3, such as text-shadow, that have already stabilized and are widely supported by browsers.

Chapter 5 shows you how to widen your choice of typeface by using web fonts in your styles, and guides you through the sometimes confusing syntax needed to embed them. The accompanying source files contain several open source fonts for you to practice with.