Chapter 12. Formatting Text: (Plus More selectors)

Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet formatting text, are you ready to jump into the deep end? By the end of this chapter, you’ll pick up 15 new CSS properties used to manipulate the appearance of text. Along the way, you’ll also learn how to use more powerful selectors for targeting elements in a particular context and with a specific id or class name.

The nature of the Web makes specifying type tricky, if not downright frustrating, particularly if you have experience designing for print (or even formatting text in a word processing program). There is no way to know for sure whether the font you specify will be available or how large or small the type will appear when it hits your users’ browsers. We’ll address the best practices for dealing with these challenges as we go along.

Throughout this chapter, we’ll be sprucing up a Black Goose Bistro online menu similar to the one we marked up back in Chapter 5 I encourage you to work along with the exercises to get a feel for how the properties work. Figure 12-1 shows how the menu looks before and after we’re done. It’s not a masterpiece, because we’re just scratching the surface of CSS here, but at least the text is more refined.

The Font Properties

When I design a text document (for print ...

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