Font Family (HTML)

Font Family (HTML)

In HTML and XHTML, a font face or font family is the typeface that will be applied by a web browser to some text. The font is relevant for the display of text on the screen, on a printer or another device.

A font family and other presentation attributes of a font may be applied in HTML code in either cascading style sheets (CSS) or the deprecated HTML font element.

.text { font-family: times, serif; font-size:14pt; font-style:italic; }

Sample text formatted with CSS in a separate stylesheet.

Sample text formatted with inline CSS.

Sample text formatted with the deprecated FONT tag.

When using CSS to apply a font whose name has whitespace in it, use quotes or single quotes to delimit the name.

.text { font-family: "Times New Roman", Garamond, 'Comic Sans'; }

In CSS, a font-family (or face in HTML) consists of a set of related fonts, grouped as font families. For example, the Times family includes different font sizes, styles (like roman and italic), and weight (like regular and bold).

The web browser will only be able to apply a font if it is available on the system on which it operates, which is not always the case. HTML code writers may list in preferential order font families to use when rendering text. The font list is separated by commas (as shown above). To avoid unexpected results, the last font family on the font list should be one of the five generic families which are by default always available in HTML and CSS. In the absence of a font being found, the web browser will use its default font, which may be a user-defined one. Depending on the web browser, a user can in fact override the font defined by the code writer. This may be for personal taste reasons, but may also be because of some physical limitation of the user, such as the need for a larger font size or the avoidance of certain colors.