Spring Into HTML and CSS

Using Shorthand for Font Styles

As with backgrounds, there's a shorthand property for font styles. These incorporate some of the font properties and the line-height property, but none of the text properties. What's more, you have to pay close attention to order when you use shorthand with fonts.

The shorthand property is font: and the order of its values is as follows: font-style, font-variant, font-weight, font-size/line-height, font-family.

p {font: italic small-caps bold 14px/15px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

This will result in all paragraphs being italic, small-capped, and bold, with a font size of 14 pixels, a line height of 15 pixels (note the slash between them, the only time this symbol is ever used in CSS) and text in Arial, ...