Styling the first letter of a particular word, etc - css

I'm trying to style a word with a big first letter and spacing for the other letters. My current solution is pretty ugly: see here (and a malfunctioning jsfiddle here).
Ideally, instead of something ugly like this: <dropcap>T</dropcap><span style="letter-spacing:.2em;">HERE</span><span style="margin-left:-.2em;"> is</span> nothing more unreasonable...
I could have something sensible like this: <dropcap>THERE</dropcap> is nothing more unreasonable...
Any ideas? Thanks.

You could just use the :first-letter pseudo-element.
The :first-letter pseudo-element is
mainly used for creating common
typographical effects like drop caps.
This pseudo-element represents the
first character of the first formatted
line of text in a block-level element,
an inline block, a table caption, a
table cell, or a list item.
It's supported in IE8+ and all modern browsers.
For example: http://jsfiddle.net/HTnBP/4/
For the other half of your question, try:
T<span>HERE</span>
div > span:first-child {
letter-spacing: .2em;
margin-right: -.2em
}
http://jsfiddle.net/HTnBP/5/
I don't really see the point in using a custom dropcap element. Unless you don't mind adding extra complexity to support IE8 and lower, or you simply don't care about those browsers.

Or maybe you can use this JS solution i found
http://webplatform.adobe.com/dropcap.js/

Related

visibility:hidden in firefox how to?

I have code like this:
.module::first-letter{
visibility:hidden;
}
But this solution is not working on Firefox:(
Display:none; not working with "::first-letter" CSS code :(
How can I hide first letter in Firefox?
you can always try setting font-size:0 while this is not fully supported.
.module::first-letter{
font-size:0
}
<div class="module">Hide Letter H </div>
or as last resort color:transparent
.module::first-letter {
color: transparent
}
<div class="module">Hide Letter H</div>
Note the difference between both, 1st removes the letter space, second
one doesn't.
Note: The following properties can be used with ::first-letter:
font properties
color properties
background properties
margin properties
padding properties
border properties
text-decoration
vertical-align (only if float is 'none')
text-transform
line-height
float
clear
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_firstletter.asp
Another note, it only works with block level elements, I am not sure, and I could be wrong, you can hide the first letter with only CSS. Quite easy in JS to pull off.
As mentioned in the other answers the properties that can are used is limited but it's possible other browser vendors are initiating greater support
As this list will be extended in the future, it is recommended that you not use any other properties inside the declaration block, in order to keep the CSS future-proof.
Source: MDN

Dealing with Korean text breaking words

I am building a website where I am displaying korean text. The client (US local) is being very unhappy because the text is breaking in the middle of words. As example of this, here is an image: Red background text being one word.
I have tried to use
word-break: keep-all;
but it isn't supported in Chrome/Safari.
What am I able to do? I have searched the web for hours and got nothing. Is this something that is expected in cjk sites or is there a solution that I haven't found.
It is a responsive site, so I can't put in hard breaks, or fake it.
demo: http://codepen.io/cibgraphics/pen/tqzfG
Why not use jquery plugin - https://github.com/mytory/jquery-word-break-keep-all
This plugin is for it. IE has CSS property word-break: keep-all; but other browser has not.
The SPACE character generally allows a line break. This is not affected by the word-break property. To disallow a line break, use NO-BREAK SPACE instead of SPACE, e.g. 십 니까. Alternatively, wrap a sequence of characters that should not be broken in a span element and set white-space: nowrap on it.
Use the CSS rule word-break: keep-all. It's now supported in all browsers but Microsoft Edge (a change since 2014 when the accepted answer above was posted).
You can try a mixed solution in which you use CSS and JS in order to simulate words and then move them to a new line if the width is not enough.
The test I did uses a CSS class with display inline-block and then wraps each Korean word into spans.
CSS
.korean-word {
display: inline-block;
}
The use a JS/jQuery code like this:
var p = $(".hero__description");
var text = p.text();
var nospace = /(\S+)/g;
var p1 = text.replace(nospace, "<span class='korean-word'>$1</span>");
p.html(p1);
The code simply takes in a text, looks at things which are NOT spaces and then puts those things into span HTML elements. This way you force a word to go to new line.
Add both line-break:strict and word-break:keep-all into your CSS. This helps solve the problem for me.

combine :first-line :before

it is possibile to combine the pseudo-element :first-line and :before? Actually I'd like to have a character before any line of a p except the first one. I try:
p:first-line:before{content:""}
p:before{content:"["}
but it do not work.
Thank you for any suggestion.
It's not currently possible to chain them as you have, nor can I think of a way to append content to every line of a paragraph except the first with just CSS. Further, the content property is only used with :before and :after.
See the section "Multiple Pseudo-elements" on http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_pseudo_elements.asp to see how you can effectively combine pseudo elements:
p:first-letter {
color:#ff0000;
font-size:xx-large;
}
p:first-line {
color:#0000ff;
font-variant:small-caps;
}
It is not possible to have two pseudo-elements in succession; both the CSS 2.1 syntax and the CSS3 syntax for selectors forbid that.
The W3C CSS Validator does not report p:first-line:before as an error, but this is a bug; I re-opened a bug report on this. (The bug is not triggered if the two-colon syntax p::first-line::before is used: the validator says “The pseudo-element ::first-line can't appear here in the context css21 [first-line::before]”.)
It would not help in this case even if the construct were valid and supported. Using :before on :first-line would be pointless, since inserting content at the start of the first line would be the same as inserting it at the start of the element.
And p:before means a pseudo-element at the start of the content of p, not at the start of each rendered line of p. It is not possible to insert a character at the start of each line of an element using CSS.

How to capitalize first line with CSS? ::first-line pseudo-element not working

Right now I've got a paragraph and I'd like to capitalize the entire first line. I've set the first paragraph to an ID "firstp" and tried:
#firstp::first-line {
text-transform: uppercase;
}
I've tried it with text-transform: capitalize but that doesn't work either. It's strange because I've managed to change the first letter (changed font size) using #firstp:first-letter.
text-transform on :first-line is really buggy right now, see the reference here http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/text-transform
You can use this jquery plugin called linify https://github.com/octopi/Linify to select the first line and then apply the property of text-transform: uppercase
Regards,
I think Chrome has a problem with ":first-line". Try removing that and using james31rock's syntax on this page, except in his example the CSS should be "#firstp{..." to reflect the ID in his HTML rather than ".makeupper".
You might want to use:
font-variant: small-caps;
It looks better in my opinion and is supported in all major browsers.
More info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps
In order to accomplish this you must use the following Pseudo-element within the correct syntax. Example:
HTML PORTION:
<selection id="Welcome">
<p>Some text</p>
</section>
CSS SHEET:
#Welcome p:first-of-type:first-line {
text-transform: uppercase;
}
I hope this helps. Sorry for the late entry. I guess, better late than never!
There might be another way ...
What if you have two spans with text inside paragraph, one of the spans would have position set to upper left corner of the paragraph, so the two spans would overlap. Now set height of the upper span to about line-height of your text and overflow to hidden so only first line of the span would be visible. Set text-transform to uppercase on the upper span and vou la you have first line in uppercase.
Downside of this solution is, uppercase text is wider so there might be missing words on next line. You can fix this by using fixed-width font or try to set letter-spacing on both spans so width of uppercase and lowercase texts would be same.
Here is jsFiddle, though it's not ideal sometimes when you change the window size, it might be sufficient.
It doesnt seem to work either way, in Chrome. In I.e. text-transform works. I do not have firefox to test with.
http://jsfiddle.net/vJSeq/4/ - using text-decoration
http://jsfiddle.net/vJSeq/3/ - using text-transform
You can see that the selector is right because it is highlighted.
My suggestion would be to use something to seperate the text you want highlighted, by creating a span tag inside of the paragraph and assign it a class
<p id="firstp">to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in <span class="makeupper">which humans live in harmony with nature, by; conserving</span> the world's biological diversity, ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable, and promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption.</p>
​
and the css
.makeupper
{
text-transform: uppercase;
}
http://jsfiddle.net/vJSeq/5/

Is there a CSS workaround for Firefox' bug: inline-block + first-letter with changed size

It's better to see a bug for yourself in Firefox: http://jsfiddle.net/kizu/btdVd/
The picture, showing the bug:
And the bug filled in 2007 on bugzilla.
The bug appears when you're adding ::first-letter pseudo-element with display: inline-block, and then change the font-size of this first-letter.
More letters in a word after the first: more extra space added (or subtracted — if the font-size is lesser than block's).
Adding float: left to the first-letter inverts the bug: with bigger font-size the width of inline-block shrinks.
So, the question: is there any CSS-only workaround for this bug? It's somewhat killing me.
I've found that triggering reflow on the whole page (or any block with a problem) fixes the problem, so I've found a way to trigger it on every such block with one-time CSS animation: http://jsfiddle.net/kizu/btdVd/23/
Still, while this fix have no downsides in rendering, it have some other ones:
it would work only for Fx5+ (that supports animations);
it still flashes the original bug for a few ms, so it's maybe somewhat blinky.
So, it's not an ideal solution, but would somewhat help when Fx4- would be outdated. Of course, you can trigger such fix onload with JS, but it's not that nice.
I don't think there's a good solution.
I have come up with a flaky solution for you though:
.test:first-letter {
font-size: 2em;
letter-spacing: -0.225em;
}
Add the letter-spacing style to the :first-letter selector in your Fiddle, and you'll find the blocks go back to roughly the right size.
Explanation:
Basically, the bug is being caused by the whole block taking its size from the font specified in the first-letter.
What I'm doing here with the letter-spacing is trying to adjust the size of this font, without affecting it's physical appearance. Adjusting the letter spacing in this way in normal text would result in the letters overlapping each other by .225 of a character width on either side.
I was initially hoping that a value of -0.25 would be sufficient -- ie a quarter of a character on each side would reduce the width of each character by half, which would be what we want because the first letter is font-size:2em, so it's twice as big.
However, the calculation isn't quite as clean as that, because the first and last characters in the string would only be overlapped on one side each, and because the first letter does in fact want to be double width, even if the rest of the characters don't.
All of this means that the exact letter-spacing value required to counter-act the bug will vary depending on how long the text, as well as the font sizes of the original text and the first letter. This is why I had to experiment a bit with the value of the letter spacing to get it working, and also explains why I couldn't get quite a perfect fit on all the text rows in your Fiddle. I would have needed a slightly different value for each block.
The value of -0.225 seems to be about the closest I can get to it being right for all your examples, but in practice you'll need to adjust it to suit your site.
Don't forget also that this is a Firefox bug, and therefore you'll need to write it in as a browser-specific hack of some sort. And be careful to keep an eye on the Firefox bug report you linked; when it does get fixed, you'll need to work out a way to keep your hack in place for users of old versions, but remove it for users with the fix.
[EDIT]
The only other working solution I've come up with is simply not to use the features which trigger the bug. ie drop the :first-letter selector, and use a separate <span> for the first letter of your text if you want to style it differently.
This is the obvious answer really, and would of course solve the problem (and would also mean that your styled first letter works in older browsers), but it would not be ideal from a semantic perspective, and more importantly doesn't actually answer the question, which is why I didn't offer it as a solution in my original answer.
I have been trying to find alternative work around for the bug as well, but the options are limited, and nothing I've tried has given as good results as my initial suggestion.
I tried a hack of making the :first-letter invisible, and using :before to display the big leading capital letter. However, this didn't work for me. I didn't linger on it too long so you may be able to get it working, but there is a problem with it in that you'd have to define the leading letter in your CSS, which wouldn't be ideal.
Another possible solution is to use the CSS font-stretch: condensed; property on the :first-letter. This would reduce the width of the first letter back to 1em, and thus resolve the width issue of the rest of the text. The down sides of this, however, are that firstly it would make the leading letter look squashed, which is probably not what you want, and secondly this style only works for fonts which support the condensed property. It turns out that this isn't well supported by the standard fonts, so may not be workable for you.
In the end, the original letter-spacing solution is still the only way I've found to really work around the bug.
This bug still exists, but some of the fixes don't work anymore. Even after triggering a reflow with an animation, the inline-block returned to the same size for me. I couldn't use the letter-spacing trick because I am already using it on the first letter, that is what is causing the problem for me. I solved the problem by adding this to the CSS for the affected selector:
-moz-padding-end: *number of pixels to compensate*;
At the moment, moz-padding-end seems to be specific to Firefox, and it can add or remove width to the end of the inline-block. Because this is a Firefox specific bug, that did the trick for me.
I know this thread is quite old now, but apparently this bug has not been fixed yet.
Using animation does work but there is a noticeable FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text). I was able to work around the problem by wrapping the first-letter in a span. This does work around both the sizing issue and the FOUT, it does add extra elements to the markup, so it depends on the needs of your site/application if this is the best fit.
.test {
background: rgba(0,0,0,0.15); /* For visualisation */
display: inline-block;
}
.test:first-letter {
font-size: 2em;
}
.test2:first-letter {
float: left;
}
.test3:first-letter {
font-size: .5em;
}
<h1>Inline-block with bigger first-letter</h1>
<span class="test">Broken</span>
<br><br>
<span class="test"><span>F</span>ixed</span>
<h1>+ floating to first-letter</h1>
<span class="test test2">Broken</span>
<br><br>
<span class="test test2"><span>F</span>ixed</span>
<h1>small size for first-letter</h1>
<span class="test test3">Broken</span>
<br><br>
<span class="test test3"><span>F</span>ixed</span>
<h1>small size, floating first-letter</h1>
<span class="test test2 test3">Broken</span>
<br><br>
<span class="test test2 test3"><span>F</span>ixed</span>
As of 2023, this is still happening in Firefox.
This is my solution using SASS, but you can see how to make it bare CSS:
txt-brand {
display:inline-block;
}
///Firefox only ///
#-moz-document url-prefix() {
margin-right: .1em;
white-space: nowrap;
&::after {
content: '\00a0';
}
}
}
.txt-brand::first-letter {
letter-spacing: -.11em;
}

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