Changing a paragraph to a different size - css

I have a section of my website that I want the paragraph font size to be slightly bigger.
I have my body set at font:
body{color:#fff; font: 1em/1.6em 'Open Sans', sans-serif;}
and the paragraph in targeting I have:
.inner-container p{font-size: 1.3em/1.6em ;text-align: justify; padding-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 8px;}
but it is being overwritten by the body is there an easy way to fix this solution or do I have to take the overall font size out of the body?
Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

but it is being overwritten by the body
No, it is not.
You CSS is simply invalid - 1.3em/1.6em is not a valid font-size.
That format is only valid for the font shorthand property. You either need to use that one (careful, it must include at least size and family, and resets other properties you do not list to default values), or specify font-size and line-height separately.

Related

Why is my font size of 1.1em way too large?

When I change my font-size from 1em to 1.1em, the font changes to a huge size. It looks like about size 48px or something. It should only increase by 10%.
* {
font-size: 1.1em;
}
Because with that selector every nested element increases the size by 10%. You might want 1.1rem instead, or better yet, just set :root { font-size: 18px; }
#ray hatfield's answer is correct.
As an alternative, you might want to change the * selector of this rule to html.
html {
font-size: 1.1em;
}
This way only the "basic font-size" (defined for the html tag, which is defined by the browser's default settings) will be increased by 10%, and all other font sizes (but only those with a relative unit like em or rem will change accordingly.

font-size and line-height set, but changing font still makes an element's height change

I'm experiencing the following issue in both Safari and Chrome.
body {
font-size: 15px;
line-height: 1.2;
}
body, .same-font {
font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
code {
font-family: Courier New, sans-serif;
}
<ul>
<li>Without any code - 18px height.</li>
<li>With <code>code</code> - 20px height.</li>
<li>With <code class="same-font">code.same-font</code> - 18px height.</li>
</ul>
Run the above snippet and the inspector. You can notice that the code element doesn't have anything modifying its font-size or line-height except body which it's inheriting from.
It's not adhering to that inherit though, because the height of its containing li is 20px, not 18 like the others... I'm not sure where that height is coming from, because the code element itself has a height of 17px (which is also of unknown origin).
When the normal/body is applied to the code element (like on the third list item), it goes back to 18px like normal. To me this means it's not any other properties that the user agent has imposed on the code element affecting the height - solely the font-family.
EDIT: For reference, something in StackOverflow's styles prevent this behaviour. The following list items all have the same height:
One
two
Three
EDIT 2: Apparently not.. if you change their monospace font to Courier New then the same problem would persist.
How can this change in size be prevented? i.e. How can you specify a line height that will be used even if the fonts within that line continue to change?
An example use case would be in a design with vertical rhythm - each line's height and the total height used by an element should be a multiple of 18px (i.e., if using that grid size) - a 20px line throws off the rhythm.
I ended up solving my own problem (to an acceptable extent) by simply tweaking with the font family and size until it worked for me:
body {
font-size: 15px;
line-height: 1.2;
}
body, .same-font {
font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
code {
font-family: Menlo, Courier New, sans-serif;
font-size: 0.9333em; /* 14/15 */
line-height: 1.28571; /* 18/14 */
}
<ul>
<li>Without any code - 18px height.</li>
<li>With <code>code</code> - 18px height.</li>
<li>With <code class="same-font">code.same-font</code> - 18px height.</li>
</ul>
Why Menlo?
I noticed that StackOverflow used Menlo and that didn't have this problem. When I tried it, it also solved the problem, however the font isn't built in on Windows.
So simply using Menlo solved the problem on Mac and didn't change anything on Windows.
Why the different font-size?
The different size changed nothing (except the font size...) when Menlo is in use - it still adhered to the line height, so Mac is all good.
However this font-size in combination with the Courier New fallback on Windows somehow got it adhering to the line height there too!
If I used 14px instead of 0.9333em it'd still work fine, but if I used 18px for the line-height instead of 1.28571, it wouldn't work. That doesn't bother me as I use relative values in my designs anyway.
So...
The Menlo font in combination with a Courier New fallback with a different font-size worked to solve my problem to a good-enough extent on Mac (Safari and Chrome) and Windows (Chrome).
My situation is lenient - a pixel difference wouldn't break my design, but just my rhythm. In cases where pixel perfection is required, I wouldn't feel safe with this voodoo method of playing with fonts and sizes...
If anybody can still explain where all of these numbers are coming from and what makes the actual difference here, that'd be great.

CSS "em" issue: avoid scaling to font-size of specific element

My site is almost totally designed in "em" (as opposed to px). It is supposed to be much better for modern browsers.
Most of the text is font-size:1em. 1em = 16px by default, I didn't specify it.
But I have some content where font-size is 1.2em and other which is 0.8em (for example for H1 or for small buttons).
The issue with "em" is that it re-scale all the sizes of an element (margin, padding, height...) according to the font-size.
I have the specific code in my CSS:
/* Reset */
html [and many other elements] {
font-size: 100%;
font: inherit;
}
/* Design */
body {
font-size: 1em;
line-height: 1; /* Line height will equal the em of each element */
}
.small-button {
font-size: 0.8em;
margin-left: 1em;
}
.normal-button {
font-size: 1em;
margin-left: 1em;
}
The normal-button has a margin of 1x1x16 = 16px. But the small-button has a margin of 1x0.8x16 = 12.8px.
Apparently this is a specific "em" property (it would not be the case in "px") which scales everything according to the font-size of the element.
This example is simple; but on my website it makes things really hard for me to keep things consistent.
How can I de-activate this property so that in the example above the 2 buttons have the same margin? (without re-calculating the sizes; which is what I am doing right now!)
It is the purpose of the em unit that it is relative to the currently set font size. If you want to use an consistent form of em, use the unit 'rem'. It is relative to the root element of your page (most likely your html tag) and stands for root em.
Check out this article by Jonathan Snook if you want to learn more about it.
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem
Personally, I set my "master unit" in the body and proceed in multiples of 10s. I hate 16pt as stock, because I don't want to use a chart to set my font sizes the sizes I want them.
body { font-size:10pt; }
As far as particular elements, keep in mind that if you have an element (say a ul) with a size of 1.2em, and the li set to 1.0, and your body is 10pt, then the li is actually based off it's parent container, so it would be 1.2em instead of 1.0(aka 10pt as set in the body), because it's parent is 1.2em.
If you have something that you want a specific size throughout (such as a main menu), I suggest you forgo the em method on that particular parent object (or the li themselves) and use a set px or pt method.

How can you reset CSS headings to the default sizes?

How can I reset the sizes of headings to the default sizes? Here's some HTML that I have:
<h2>Hello World</h2>
Here's the CSS for it:
h2 {
font-size: 16px;
margin: 1em 0 0.5em;
}
/*I'd like to reset that height of 16px and use the default browser height */
h2 {
font-size: 100%;
}
I need to override the old h2 selector and reset the headings to the default size? I've Googled this and it said that the heading sizes were browser dependent and I don't want to hard-code the heading sizes.
This is a really basic question I know but somehow I can't wrap my head around what value I need to use to reset the height.
According to A List Apart, the default body font size is 16px (and this is consisent across browsers).
The W3C recommended default stylesheet shows the h2 size as 1.5 em.
Some simple calculation brings us to 16 * 1.5 = 24px.
So, setting your h2 font-size to 24px should do it.
In general, you cannot set a property of an element to its default value except by not setting the property in any author style sheet. Methods suggested for this are based on misunderstandings or on some assumptions about defaults, but the defaults are browser-dependent.
You can use Normalize.css from the beginning and it'll normalize the heading sizes across browsers:
Normalize.css makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. It precisely targets only the styles that need normalizing.
For example, here is a fix for the <h1> tag:
/*
* Addresses `h1` font sizes within `section` and `article` in Firefox 4+,
* Safari 5, and Chrome.
*/
h1 {
font-size: 2em;
}
There isn't a way to go back to the browser's default font-size because everyone does it a little bit differently.
When you change the font size on your h2, it will impact the size of your margins as well (since they are defined in em). I suspect you are trying to modify the font-size to 16px in an attempt to match the margins of other elements that are also specified in em. If this is the case, you will need to set your properties differently:
h2 {
font-size: 1.5em;
margin: .75em 0 0.333em; /* (1 / 1.5) 0 (.5 / 1.5) */
}
The default font-size for headers is medium. See here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/font-size
So you would do:
h2 {font-size: medium;}
Probably the easiest way to have the heading font-size be set back to default is to remove the font-size declaration from the h2 element you already have, so instead of:
h2 {
font-size: 16px;
margin: 1em 0 0.5em;
}
you will just have
h2 {
margin: 1em 0 0.5em;
}
You will also want to check your style sheets for any other spots a h2 font-size might be declared. If you can't or don't want to remove the font-size delcaration you can do the following to reset the font-size for all h2 elements to default
h2 {
font-size: medium !important;
}
The font-size of medium is the default value for all browsers and the !important at the end makes it override all other declared styles. You need to be careful using important though because it makes it much harder to determine how a style is going to cascade through the elements and/or how it is being applied.
Cheers and how this helps.
Source for default value: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_font_font-size.asp

Effect of !important declaration when sizing (fonts) with rem

UPDATE: Please note that I am seeing this issue only in Chrome (latest version). Everything seems to be fine in Firefox.
By definition:
The rem unit is relative to the root—or the <html>—element. That means
that we can define a single font size on the <html> element and define
all rem units to be a percentage of that.
Let me explain my situation with an example...
Relevant CSS:
html {
font-size: 87.5%;
}
body {
font-size: 17px;
font-size: 1.21428571rem;
}
code {
font-size: 14px !important;
font-size: 1rem !important;
}
I am using the !important declaration to override the font-size of inline code.
The thing is, I noticed that the font-size of code blocks is much smaller than 14px, most probably 12px. But if I remove the !important declaration and set the font-size on a specific code element (styling a specific inline code element), the fonts-size is nice and fine at what appears to be 14px.
Does you have any idea as to how !important declarations may affect sizing in rem's? (Especially considering in my case.)
First off !important is lazy coding and dangerous to maintainability. It's toxic and breaks the nature of CSS (the Cascading portion). Avoid it at all costs.
Second:
code {
font-size: 14px !important;
font-size: 1rem !important;
}
Might as well be written:
code {
font-size: 1rem !important;
}
The second rule overrides the first (again, the Cascading nature of CSS)
rem stands for root em, which is the font-size of the top level element (i.e., html)
and what your rule is saying 1 x the em of the html element, with is 87.5% of the browser default.
EDIT:
Your <p> tags have a font-size of 100% inherited from the parent element which is eventually inherited from body and body has a 1.2142857rem which is roughly 17px This is why you're seeing a difference in font sizes, which is also exacerbated by the the difference of monospace and sans serif fonts.
Okay, the issue was with (1) font-family not defined for code and pre blocks, which meant Chrome and other webkit browsers chose some monospace font that appears smaller (2) line-height was smaller (almost equal to the font-size).
Fixing these two has solved the problem.
I have no idea why Chrome Dev Tools Web Inspector's "Computed Style" shows 11px as the font-size (also applies to any webkit browser, including Safari). I can confirm that it's showing the wrong value because by changing the font to Arial I could easily tell that it's 14px.
Also, after setting the font-family on code and pre blocks, Chrome now shows the correct computed font-size value.

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