HTML Font Style – How to Change Text Color and Size with an HTML Tag

Kolade Chris

When you code in HTML and add some text, you don’t want to leave it like that. You want to make that text look good.

And to do that, you need to change their appearance through the color and font-size properties of CSS.

In this tutorial, I will show you two different ways you can make your HTML texts look good.

Basic font-size Syntax

How to Change Text Size and Text Color in the HTML Tag

You can change the color and size of your text right inside its tag with the color and font-size properties. This is known as inline CSS. You do it with the style attribute in HTML.

In the HTML code below, we will change the color and size of the freeCodeCamp text.

It looks like this in the browser:

To change the size of the text, you’ll use the style attribute, and then set a value with the font-size property like this:

The text now looks like this in the browser:

If you are wondering what 4rem is, it’s a unit of measurement. It’s the same as 64 pixels, because 16px makes 1rem unless you change the root font-size ( html ) to another value.

To change the color of the text, you can use the style attribute, and then set a value with the color property:

This is what we now have in the browser:

Combining the font-size and color properties gives us this in the browser:

How to Change Text Size and Text Color in an External CSS File

You can also change the color and size of text in an external stylesheet. Most importantly, you have to link the external CSS in the head section of your HTML.

The basic syntax for doing it looks like this:

Now, to change the text size and color of the freeCodeCamp text, you need to select it in the stylesheet and apply the appropriate properties and values to it.

Remember this is our simple HTML code:

You can change the color and size of the text by selecting the element (h1) and assigning values to the color and font-size properties:

We have the same result in the browser:

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial gives you the knowledge to be able to change the size and color of your HTML text so you can make them look better.

Thank you for reading, and keep coding.

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HTML Styles

The HTML style attribute is used to add styles to an element, such as color, font, size, and more.

Example

The HTML Style Attribute

Setting the style of an HTML element, can be done with the style attribute.

The HTML style attribute has the following syntax:

The property is a CSS property. The value is a CSS value.

You will learn more about CSS later in this tutorial.

Background Color

The CSS background-color property defines the background color for an HTML element.

Example

Set the background color for a page to powderblue:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Example

Set background color for two different elements:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Text Color

The CSS color property defines the text color for an HTML element:

Example

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Fonts

The CSS font-family property defines the font to be used for an HTML element:

Example

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Text Size

The CSS font-size property defines the text size for an HTML element:

Example

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

Text Alignment

The CSS text-align property defines the horizontal text alignment for an HTML element:

Example

Centered Heading

Centered paragraph.

Chapter Summary

• Use the style attribute for styling HTML elements
• Use background-color for background color
• Use color for text colors
• Use font-family for text fonts
• Use font-size for text sizes
• Use text-align for text alignment

HTML Exercises

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Fundamental text and font styling

In this article we’ll start you on your journey towards mastering text styling with CSS. Here we’ll go through all the basic fundamentals of text/font styling in detail, including setting font weight, family and style, font shorthand, text alignment and other effects, and line and letter spacing.

Prerequisites:	Basic computer literacy, HTML basics (study Introduction to HTML), CSS basics (study Introduction to CSS).
Objective:	To learn the fundamental properties and techniques needed to style text on web pages.

What is involved in styling text in CSS?

If you have worked with HTML or CSS already, e.g., by working through these tutorials in order, then you know that text inside an element is laid out inside the element’s content box. It starts at the top left of the content area (or the top right, in the case of RTL language content), and flows towards the end of the line. Once it reaches the end, it goes down to the next line and flows to the end again. This pattern repeats until all the content has been placed in the box. Text content effectively behaves like a series of inline elements, being laid out on lines adjacent to one another, and not creating line breaks until the end of the line is reached, or unless you force a line break manually using the element.

Note: If the above paragraph leaves you feeling confused, then no matter — go back and review our Box model article to brush up on the box model theory before carrying on.

The CSS properties used to style text generally fall into two categories, which we’ll look at separately in this article:

• Font styles: Properties that affect a text’s font, e.g., which font gets applied, its size, and whether it’s bold, italic, etc.
• Text layout styles: Properties that affect the spacing and other layout features of the text, allowing manipulation of, for example, the space between lines and letters, and how the text is aligned within the content box.

Note: Bear in mind that the text inside an element is all affected as one single entity. You can’t select and style subsections of text unless you wrap them in an appropriate element (such as a or ), or use a text-specific pseudo-element like ::first-letter (selects the first letter of an element’s text), ::first-line (selects the first line of an element’s text), or ::selection (selects the text currently highlighted by the cursor).

Fonts

Let’s move straight on to look at properties for styling fonts. In this example, we’ll apply some CSS properties to the following HTML sample:

h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p> 

Color

The color property sets the color of the foreground content of the selected elements, which is usually the text, but can also include a couple of other things, such as an underline or overline placed on text using the text-decoration property.

color can accept any CSS color unit, for example:

This will cause the paragraphs to become red, rather than the standard browser default of black, like so:

h1>Tommy the cath1> p>Well I remember it as though it were a meal ago…p> p> Said Tommy the Cat as he reeled back to clear whatever foreign matter may have nestled its way into his mighty throat. Many a fat alley rat had met its demise while staring point blank down the cavernous barrel of this awesome prowling machine. Truly a wonder of nature this urban predator — Tommy the cat had many a story to tell. But it was a rare occasion such as this that he did. p> 

Font families

To set a different font for your text, you use the font-family property — this allows you to specify a font (or list of fonts) for the browser to apply to the selected elements. The browser will only apply a font if it is available on the machine the website is being accessed on; if not, it will just use a browser default font. A simple example looks like so:

This would make all paragraphs on a page adopt the arial font, which is found on any computer.

Web safe fonts

Speaking of font availability, there are only a certain number of fonts that are generally available across all systems and can therefore be used without much worry. These are the so-called web safe fonts.

Most of the time, as web developers we want to have more specific control over the fonts used to display our text content. The problem is to find a way to know which font is available on the computer used to see our web pages. There is no way to know this in every case, but the web safe fonts are known to be available on nearly all instances of the most used operating systems (Windows, macOS, the most common Linux distributions, Android, and iOS).

The list of actual web safe fonts will change as operating systems evolve, but it’s reasonable to consider the following fonts web safe, at least for now (many of them have been popularized thanks to the Microsoft Core fonts for the Web initiative in the late 90s and early 2000s):

Name	Generic type	Notes
Arial	sans-serif	It’s often considered best practice to also add Helvetica as a preferred alternative to Arial as, although their font faces are almost identical, Helvetica is considered to have a nicer shape, even if Arial is more broadly available.
Courier New	monospace	Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Courier New font called Courier. It’s considered best practice to use both with Courier New as the preferred alternative.
Georgia	serif
Times New Roman	serif	Some OSes have an alternative (possibly older) version of the Times New Roman font called Times. It’s considered best practice to use both with Times New Roman as the preferred alternative.
Trebuchet MS	sans-serif	You should be careful with using this font — it isn’t widely available on mobile OSes.
Verdana	sans-serif

Note: Among various resources, the cssfontstack.com website maintains a list of web safe fonts available on Windows and macOS operating systems, which can help you make your decision about what you consider safe for your usage.

Note: There is a way to download a custom font along with a webpage, to allow you to customize your font usage in any way you want: web fonts. This is a little bit more complex, and we will discuss it in a separate article later on in the module.

Default fonts

CSS defines five generic names for fonts: serif , sans-serif , monospace , cursive , and fantasy . These are very generic and the exact font face used from these generic names can vary between each browser and each operating system that they are displayed on. It represents a worst case scenario where the browser will try its best to provide a font that looks appropriate. serif , sans-serif , and monospace are quite predictable and should provide something reasonable. On the other hand, cursive and fantasy are less predictable and we recommend using them very carefully, testing as you go.

The five names are defined as follows:

body  font-family: sans-serif; >
 
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