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;
}
Related
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.
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 have a page which displays fine on the screen.
I have a css which then formats the screen for print and re-sizes the sections.
My problem is that the print layout has a margin of approximately an inch from the left of the page which makes 2 elements print off the page on the right hand side.
I could probably compress the contents from the right but I want to know if I can reduce the margin on the left (and basically center the contents)
I have set the body tag on print to margin:0; padding: 0; but this has no effect?
Is there another setting that controls print margins?
You can set the print margin (and landscape orientation) with CSS like:
#media print {
#page {
size: letter landscape;
margin: 4.0cm;
}
}
And the good news is, it works! (On Chrome. Not supported on other browsers though I did not test IE9.)
The margin must be in a unit that makes sense in print -- pixels are not allowed.
Chrome will not shrink the margin below a fixed minimum, which may be determined by the printer driver.
You could also try to set
margin:0; and padding:0;
to the html, main content div and p tags
and see if that helps.
Otherwise, your best bet is to set a specific width on your elements.
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.
Is it good to add line-height in body{line-height:1.5} or it would be better if i add separately for tag by tag like p{ line height:1em} etc.
Edit:
body {line-height:in em} create problem with if we put image with float inside
Edit: 24 April 2010:
If i have to add different line heights to elements
like
p {line-height: 1.4}
h1 {line-height:1.6}
h2 {line-height:1.2}
ul li {line-height:1.1}
then shouldn't i use line height in body {line-height:1.4}
if body {line-height:1.4} and h1 {line-height:1.6} then what would be line height for h1?
It just depends. If you put it in the body then you get to be lazy and not worry about ever doing it again, but your going to lose control because everything on the page will have the line-height set to 1.5. Whereas if you declared it in each tag, you gain lots of control, but will have to do more work.
Personally I would go for the tag-by-tag solution, but I'm a control freak, so...
A word of caution on putting line-height on the body tag:
If you specify a height in percent, you would intuitively expect to enlargen / shrink all line-heights (e.g. 50% shrink to half, 200% duplicate space, 100% nothing happens).
body {
line-height: 120%
}
This is not the case. For paragraphs and normal-sized text it works fine. But for headings it's a disaster, since the same line-height as for normal text gets applied... See what happens here: https://jsfiddle.net/11jgwzzu/ .
It works, if you use for example 1.5 instead of 150%.
With this in mind, I think it's quite okay to use something like this:
body {
line-height: 1.61 // Golden Ratio
}
to make the entire page a bit more spacious. You can still overwrite this behaviour for some specific elements if you want to, but I often find I don't even have to overwrite it since I think line-height: 1.61 looks pretty good everywhere.
The obvious answer is specifying it once in the body is less work (and overhead).
There is a definite CON: if you use a unit (like 'px') in the line-height, and you specify it on the body, it will be used like that throughout the page. This may create crazy results with fe big page titles overlapping eachother or tiny aside text getting ridiculous whitespace between lines. If you dont use a unit, and specify it nowhere else, the vertical rythm of the page becomes messy.
Read this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss/
Specifying a unit (in this case, px) when setting the line-height
enables the value to be inherited throughout the page. If a unitless
line-height had been specified, the multiplier would have been
inherited, resulting in line-heights being rendered proportionally to
the text size, thus breaking the vertical rhythm.
It is common in websites to never use a unit on line-height, which is one of the reasons why the most websites look a bit messy, designwise. Just look at this page, already :-)
I would specify a unitless line-height on the body element, and use a unit-based line-height on a designated 'content' area where you know exactly what sort of content to expect (the 'content body').
*-pike
put it where it's appropriate
if you want line-height: 1.5 on everything within the body, put in on the body
if you only want line-height: 1.5 on everything in the main content area, put it on the div id="MainContent"
etc.