I'm hoping to use VW units to size my typography, but when doing so the text is huge and obviously larger than the viewport width. Essentially I want my text to be responsive within the parent .container, so the text is never cropped or overflowed as it would be if using a static size unit like px or em?
HTML
<div class="container">
<h1>Responsive Typography!</h1>
</div>
CSS
.container {
width: 100%;
background: red;
height: 100%;
}
h1 {
font-size: 40vw;
}
FIDDLE
Your Fiddle is rendering correctly.
font-size, classically, referred to the width of a capital letter M. Let's go with that for now.*
1vw is 1% of the viewport width.
Thus, font-size: 40vw roughly means "render this text such that the width of a capital letter M would be 40% of the viewport width". In other words, each individual character is going to be pretty huge.
It's not going to break to a new line because it's all one word, and CSS only breaks between words by default. (To break on characters within a word, you would use word-break: break-all on the element. It usually looks terrible, though.)
You confirmed in a comment that you're trying to scale up the font size in your header so that the full text in it is some percentage of the viewport width. Depending on your circumstances, you can either
use a smaller font-size, still in vw, and accept that text won't always be a predictable fixed width; or
try something like FitText to dynamically resize the font.
It's a shame, but there isn't a way to do quite what you want with pure CSS; as is often the case your choices are to compromise on your design goal or use some clever JS/hacks to achieve it.
* A note on font-size: what I said above isn't really how font-size is worked out; it just happens to be close enough for most fonts and it makes my answer easier to read. The actual situation is more complicated.
A more accurate rule-of-thumb is the body height, i.e. the vertical distance from the top of an ascender (upper part of letters like b, d and h) to the bottom of a descender (lower part of letters like g, j and p) on the same line. However, even this is very course and often wrong; it ultimately comes down to the font metrics, and will vary significantly between fonts.
Related
I have an h1 I want to fit the entire width of the viewport which consists of 13 characters in a monospaced font. After reading the CSS-Tricks article on viewport sized typography it seems like logically if I want to achieve this I simply have to set my h1's styles to:
h1 {
font-size: 13vw;
font-family: monospace;
}
This however is rendering with a bit of space left over (highlight the text to see the white space):
(There would be an image here but I don't have enough rep so click here for the JSFiddle)
I have tried other sizes, font-size: 14vw; is slightly too big, font-size: 13.99vw; seems just right, but strangely font-size: 13.999vw; is still too big?
Can someone explain what is going on here? Why would each character of a 13 character length string in a monospaced font require more than (100/13)% of the viewport width to fit the entire viewport width?
Before I begin I'm just going to say that I'm not going to give you a workaround due to issues I've raised in comments on Stoyan Dekov's answer. Instead I'm only going to answer your question of Can someone explain what is going on here?
font-size != width
The problem here is that you're assuming font-size is the same thing as width. It isn't. The CSS Fonts Module defines font-size as:
...the desired height of glyphs from the font.
This means that font-size is more comparable to height than it is to width.
This isn't specific to the vw unit, either. If you specify a font-size in pixels you'll also notice that the computed width does not match the font-size.
But even then it all depends on which font-family you're using anyway, as the same paragraph continues to say:
For scalable fonts, the font-size is a scale factor applied to the EM unit of the font. (Note that certain glyphs may bleed outside their EM box.) For non-scalable fonts, the font-size is converted into absolute units and matched against the declared font-size of the font, using the same absolute coordinate space for both of the matched values.
The key words here being scalable and non-scalable.
Even if a non-scalable font was being used though, 13vw would not reflect each character's width. This would never work with vw, but it may work with vh but only if the aspect ratio of each individual character matched the screen's aspect ratio.
The problem is if a text is the exact same size as the parent container, it will span across a second line.
body {
margin: 0;
width:100px
}
h1 {
font-family: monospace;
width:100px;
}
That will cause the text to go onto a new line as they are both 100px. That's why 14vw is too big, but 13.99 is just enough: Fiddle DEMO
However, you can use text-align: justify; to achieve what you want.
Take a look at this Fiddle DEMO.
I am pretty new to CSS, and would like to know if there is/are some sort of rule/rules of thumb for determining when to use different units to define layouts. Currently I have everything defined in %, because I thought that'd be good for window resizing. That is not the case, text starts to overflow, images get screwed around and so on.
Any help will be appreceiated.
Typically, I use the following
Layouts - Pixel (Unless something needs to be a % width/height)
Fonts - Pixel (Sometimes % for accessibility, but it is a nightmare to maintain)
Generally speaking, you can use pixels most of the time. The font issue is a more complex one. For instance, if you want the "increase font-size" features to work within a browser without resizing the rest of the page, you need to use %'s. However, when using % font sizes, a child element always inherits the parents font-size, so you get the following:
body { font-size:87%; }
h1 { font-size:87%; }
This will mean that the h1 is actually 87% of 87%. This can be quite annoying. As you end up with percentages > 100%. It gets very thick fast, and is best avoided.
I'm not sure if em's work in the same way, I've never looked into them in great detail.
Using percentages to have a layout work in different size viewports is a very advanced technique, and is often done dynamically using javascript. Until you are more familiar with CSS, and can look at working percentage based layouts and understand enough to replicate it, you are better sticking to PX.
If you are going the javascript route it is really quite simple. For a start use jQuery as it makes resizing your layout a breeze compared to trying to do it with native javascript. Then $(window).height(); gives you the height of the viewport; $(window).width(); gives you the width. You set a default px width for your container, and then use percentages for all other block level elements (containers, within the container, sidebar, main etc) and do this:
function percentagize() {
var height = $(window).height()-100;
var width = $(window).width()-20;
$("div#container").css({
'height' : height+'px',
'width' : width+'px',
'margin': '0 auto'
});
}
$(document).ready(function() {
percentagize();
$(window).bind('resize','percentagize');
})
This should give you an idea: http://w3schools.com/cssref/css_units.asp
% is not explained properly on that page, but it means x% of the containing block.
You should use ems for fonts so that they are always relatively sized... by default they are 1 em or 16px... you can set play with this by setting body { font-size: 75% } which makes 1em the equivalent of 12px The PxtoEm calculator is great. From here you can do things like
h1 { font-size: 3em }
p { font-size: 1em }
now no matter what you set that body font size to the h1 tag will always be 3 times larger than a paragraph. It gives more flexibility and keeps yout type hierachy proportional.
For layouts it really depends on the layout type... for the classic fixed with central column then use pixels.... for fluid or adaptive layouts then use percentages (or a mix of fixed width, i.e. left hand nav bar andpercentages)
Use em as much as possible, since this is the most maintainable. The em unit depends on the font size of the current element, so if you change the base font size, em-units scale along.
Use px in screen style sheets when you need a fixed size. Typically you would specify the size of the base font in pixels. Image sizes should also be specified in px, since an image should not scale up or down just because you change a font - it will just make the image blurry. Also border thicknesses should probably be specified in pixels, since you don't want it to depend on font sizes.
Use pt, pc, in, cm, mm only in print media style sheets. You probably wouldn't to mix metric and imperial in the same style sheet, so decide on either in or cm/mm.
% is tricky since it means something different depending on the property. For font-sizes, 100% = 1em, so its just a matter of preference if you like % or em. (I prefer em for font sizes, since % have different meaning in other contexts.) It is not affected by window scaling though. The font size doesn't scale with the window size, and neither does em or % units.
For width and height on boxes, % refers to percent of the size of the parent box, which for the root element is depending on the window size. This is much less useful than it sounds! For example if you have a flow of text without any specified width, the lines will become too long to read comfortably. If you specify the width of the text box in em's you can give it a nice readable line-length, on any screen. But if you specify the width in % it will scale with the size of the window, which means it can still be too long on some screens and to short on others. Scaling with the window size sounds good in theory, but is rarely what you want.
I wasn't sure how to word the question for this topic...sorry.
I'm just starting to learn CSS.
I have a <div> with a background image and there is text within the <div>. I read that choosing font sizes in em is a good choice because some people might require larger text sizes in their browsers. So setting the font-size with em would accommodate these types of users better.
But the problem with allowing the text to be resized, is that in many cases, the text within my <div> is going to go beyond the size of the background image and make the page look terrible and poorly designed.
Is there a way to use CSS and allow the background image to 'match' or 'expand' to accommodate to larger text size?
You could set the width of the div to the img width so that it never expands wider (beyond the image).
Of course, the enlarged text would force the div to grow height-wise.
You could also set the background-img to repeat (if the image allows for it), so that when the text expands, the image is repeated.
background-image:url('whatever.png');
background-repeat:repeat-x;
// x = horizontal, y = vertical
Since you are starting out, you might want to read http://na.isobar.com/standards/#_pixels_vs_ems wherein they say:
We use the px unit of measurement to
define font size, because it offers
absolute control over text. We realize
that using the em unit for font sizing
used to be popular, to accommodate for
Internet Explorer 6 not resizing pixel
based text. However, all major
browsers (including IE7 and IE8) now
support text resizing of pixel units
and/or full-page zooming. Since IE6 is
largely considered deprecated, pixels
sizing is preferred. Additionally,
unit-less line-height is preferred
because it does not inherit a
percentage value of its parent
element, but instead is based on a
multiplier of the font-size.
Correct:
#selector {
font-size: 13px;
line-height: 1.5; /* 13 * 1.5 = 19.5 ~ Rounds to 20px. */
}
Incorrect:
/* Equivalent to 13px font-size and 20px line-height, but only if the browser default text size is 16px. */
#selector {
font-size: 0.813em;
line-height: 1.25em;
}
We have a CSS file with some rules similar to the following:
.directory-result ul
{
margin-top: 20px;
width: 60em;
}
.about-text
{
margin-top: 1em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
Everything is working ok, but we're wondering specifically about the inconsistencies between the margin-top values. One is 20px and the other is 1em.
Which is the best one to go with? What are the points I should consider when deciding which to use? Thanks.
em units are used for better scalability of the page when the size of the elements depend on the page's scale. It's especially important for old browsers (e.g. IE6) and mobile platforms.
px units are used for absolute values, while em is relative to the font size of the particular element.
1em means one font-line, e.g. you have a box with font-size 12px that means that 1em will be equal to 12px
Also, using px seems easier because you know the exact value, but em units inherit the value of their container.
<p>Text</p>
<div class="box">
<p>Lorem</p>
</div>
p {
font-size: 1.2em;
}
.box {
font-size: 1.2em;
}
In this case, the first <p> will have font-size equal to the basic font-size * 1.2, and the second <p> will display with font-size * 1.2 * 1.2.
They're simply two different ways of measuring. Em is linked to the font size (traditionally, 1em is roughly the width of the letter M in a given typeface), while px is pixels.
If you build everything using em, everything will scale accordingly when the user adjusts their font size (e.g. using IE's Page > Text Size menu). It also makes it easier to work to a vertical rhythm.
Pixels are better when you want to build something "pixel-perfect". Be aware that a CSS pixel doesn't always equal a screen pixel - mainly because modern browsers and mobile devices allow for zooming. This isn't usually a problem though because the entire page is scaled accordingly.
Whatever you do, make sure you're consistent throughout - it makes life much easier later on.
The ems unit is relative to the current font size in the browser. So if the user increases the font size*, or if you change an element’s font size in the CSS, the margins should still look “right” in proportion to the text.
*(This ceases to matter if the user zooms the page instead of increasing the text size (as is the default in Firefox and Chrome now, and is an option in IE).
If you're using a margin to position something a set number of pixels away from something else, then you should obviously stick with pixels.
Also here is a very good in depth tutorial:
px – em – % – pt – keyword
In this example directory-result ul represents a block - some sort of list/menu where pixel dimensions are quite important. We can’t always rely on em which defines the text size, because if we need 20px space due to some background image – well, we need 20px, no compromises.
Note that you can't create and save the image i.e. 10em wide, therefore I see no reason why should I use different units on a web page. It just creates confusion and later on it is very difficult to maintain the layout.
There is a one place though, where using em is advisable – I’m talking about text blocks. I’m guessing in your code about-text is placed within other text where adding top/bottom margin of 1em (height of text) makes sense. It’s like in any text editor (i.e. line spacing in MS Word) – text looks best when spacing between lines is defined by multiplying the height of text
So in my opinion – everywhere where you deal with design and you use images by default measured in pixels – usepixels for all padding/margin.
Everywhere where you deal with text inside a text block, and you want to add even spacing between the text nodes – useem.
I am trying to figure out what margins are best for readability and i figure it is best to use standard paper size and margins. I looked it up and its seems like 8.5 is standard. I looked up how to do basic CSS and hit a problem
margin-left: 1.5in;
margin-right: 8.0in;
I was excepting the left will start from 1.5 of the left side as well as right being 8in from the left side. It turns out right is 8in from the right ruining my page. How do i set it so the width of the text is 7inches no matter what resolution the user browser is on?
You could set the width of the body to 7 inches. But the browser will automatically lay out the text for you to fit the paper. So I would have set both the left and the right margins to 1.5 inches. You may use a separate CSS file for printing.
Take a look at the CSS Box Model and Media Type rules. The #page rule (for paged media) may also be of interest.
As has already been said, you should use the width property to define the width of the block-level element. You can then use padding and margin to pad the text and put a margin around its container.
Something like this will let you specify the document style for print:
#media print {
p {
font-family: times,serif;
font-size: 12px
margin: 1cm 2cm;
page-break-inside: avoid;
widows: 2;
orphans: 2;
}
}
I would recommend letting the printer software automatically determine the dimensions of the text based on the margins you specify and the page used to print. That way the user can more easily print on whatever dimension paper they want. Here are some print-specific CSS properties you may want to use to format the printed document.
And I believe serif fonts are easier to read on print (or so people say), so that might also be worth considering.
You're looking at it backwards: margin-right is the width in from the right-hand side of the viewport (or the piece of paper). So for a 8.5" piece of paper with 1" margins on all sides, you'd want:
body{
margin-left: 1in;
margin-right: 1in;
width: 6.5in;
}