12.8. Text Properties
Text
properties cover those aspects of
text formatting other than what can be adjusted merely by changing
the font. These include how far the text is indented, how the
paragraph is aligned, and so forth. The most common of these
properties include:
- text-indent
-
The text-indent
property specifies how far in to indent the first line of the block.
(Indents of all lines are generally applied via margin properties.)
Hanging indents can be specified by making
text-indent negative. This property only applies
to block-level elements. For example, this style rule indents the
first line of the story element by half an inch
from the left side:
story { text-indent: 0.5in }
- text-align
-
The text-align property
can be set to left, right,
center, or justify to align the
text with the left edge of the block or the right edge of the block,
to center the text in the block, or to spread the text out across the
block. This property only applies to block-level elements.
- text-decoration
-
The text-decoration
property can be set to underline,
overline, line-through or
blink to produce the obvious effects. Note,
however, that the CSS2 specification specifically allows browsers to
ignore the request to make elements blink. This is a good thing.
- text-transform
-
The text-transform
property has three main values: capitalize,
uppercase, and lowercase.
Uppercase changes all the text to capital letters LIKE THIS.
Lowercase changes all the text to lowercase letters like these.
Capitalize simply uppercases the first letter of each word Like This,
but leaves the other letters alone. The default value of this
property is none, which performs no
transformation. It can also be set to inherit to
indicate that the same transform as used on the parent element should
be used.
TIP:
Changing the case in English is fairly straightforward, but this
isn't true of all languages. In particular, software
written by native English speakers tends to do a very poor job of
algorithmically changing the case in ligature-heavy European
languages like Maltese or context-sensitive languages like Arabic.
Outside of English text, it's best to make the
transformations directly in the source document rather than relying
on the stylesheet engine to make the correct decisions about which
letters to capitalize.
- white-space
-
The white-space
property determines whether text is wrapped. It has only four legal
values: normal, pre,
nowrap, and inherit.
Normal is of course the default and simply means
to wrap the text wherever convenient, much as is done in this
paragraph. Pre means to preserve all line breaks
and whitespace in the document, as does the pre
element in HTML. Nowrap means that runs of
whitespace can be condensed, but that line breaks will not be
inserted. Finally, inherit simply takes on the
same behavior as the parent element.
 |  |  |
| 12.7. Font Properties |  | 12.9. Colors |
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