Typography

I love stumbling upon CSS properties in time of great need. Recently, I was working on a personal project, and I wanted to have multi-line highlighted text. My requirements were pretty simple from a design point of view:

1. Text should be highlighted, i.e. have a background colour
2. Highlights should only cover areas where there is text
3. Each line should have a little left and right padding so that the text isn’t flush against the highlight box

My desired HTML was something like this:

And the desired output something like this:

If I used it as is, the output would look something like this:

So, how can we solve this? Luckily, CSS has thrown us a piece of candy in the box-decoration-break property. Let’s take a look.

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Here’s an excerpt from the MDN:

The box-decoration-break CSS property specifies how the background, padding, border, border-image, box-shadow, margin and clip of an element is applied when the box for the element is fragmented. Fragmentation occurs when an inline box wraps onto multiple lines…

Basically, this property is giving us a bit more granularity in how an inline element gets rendered. By default, it’s set to slice, which means that it treats the inline box as if it weren’t fragmented at all. I like to think of it like this. Imagine that we took that multi-line inline element, stretched it out onto one line, applied the styling, sliced it into pieces, then moved each piece back to a new line. The result would be that the properties mentioned above would act on the entire box of the element, rather than each of its parts.

However, there is a second option for us, and that is:

When we set the property to clone, we can imagine a similar scenario as above, except one important thing. This time, let’s imagine that all the styles get applied after the element gets fragmented and distributed on multiple lines. In other words, paddings, borders, etc would be applied to each fragment almost as if they were separate elements.

That’s pretty awesome, and with one simple property, we’ve unleashed a ton of possibilities! Here’s a CodePen link with various demos for you to play around with.

There’s a × character in most common fonts which you should use instead of an x for close, but getting it to look right across devices requires an eye for the detail.

Here’s a screenshot of the simulator vs. the real device, with exactly the same CSS applied to create the effect. Notice that the vertical align is off?

It took me a while to work out what was different, but it’s the font. The font I’m using (if you’re on a Mac - as I was), is Helvetia Neue, but my Android doesn’t have that font, so it was falling back to the next default (possibly set as sans-serif, which could be Open Sans, or it could be something else). In this case, the different font had a slightly different letter height, so it caused (obviously) as slightly different result.

The pro tip: make sure to use a common font, probably Arial (IHMO ideally a font that doesn’t need to be downloaded) for button icons.

Yes, I know this is obvious if you’re using an icon font…but maybe not immediately obvious if you’re re-using system fonts.

Opening links in a new window [or tab] allows users to explore related materials without losing contact with the originating site; removing link underlines makes pages cleaner and easier to read because underlines are distracting and interfere with letterforms; and creating fixed-width pages restricts line length so users are not forced to read long lines of text. However, each decision has the potential of causing usability problems for some users: When links open in a new window, users who rely on the back button to navigate the Web will not have access to that functionality; when links are not underlined, users who cannot distinguish colors may not be able to identify links; and when pages are set to a fixed width, users who need to enlarge text will be forced to read narrow text columns.

You can use a little-known, yet important and powerful CSS property to make text run vertically.

Or instead of running text vertically, you can layout a set of icons or interface buttons in this way. Or, of course, with anything on your page.

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If you do want a bit more of a taste, look at this example that adds text-orientation: upright; to the mix — turning the individual letters of the latin font to be upright instead of sideways.

It became more popular to “go fully responsive” with layouts, where widths were largely in percentages, so that you get to use as much room is available at any given screen size. To a point, anyway.

You can also “go fully responsive” with typography, in a sense. There are a number of Pens by Mike Riethmuller that tackle things like fluid type size, fluid modular scale, and even fluid vertical rhythm.

It’s worth reading up on Mike’s technique here, but a distilled Sass version is like: