Styling Text - Beginning CSS3 - page 60

Increasing or Decreasing the Space Between Letters
he letter-spacing property controls the amount of horizontal space between letters. In print terminology, this
is known as tracking . The property accepts the following values:
normal This is the default. It allows the browser to adjust the space between
characters to justify text. Setting letter-spacing explicitly to normal cancels any
inherited value.

Use a length value with a unit of measurement to specify how much space to add or
subtract from the normal spacing between characters. The em unit is particularly useful
because it's directly proportional to the font size.
Figure 4-7 demonstrates the effect of this property in letter-spacing.html . The first heading is displayed as
normal. In the second, letter-spacing has been set to 0.2em . And the final one uses -0.1em .

Figure 4-7. Even a small amount of letter-spacing makes a big difference to the look of text

Controlling the Space Between Words
Computers have no concept of what constitutes a word, but the word-spacing property adjusts the width of the
space character. You use it in exactly the same way as letter-spacing .

■ The CSS3 Text module proposes a space-separated list of up to three values for letter-spacing and
word-spacing . One value represents the optimum, minimum, and maximum spacing. With two values, the first rep-
resents the optimum and minimum spacing, and the second represents the maximum. if three values are given, they
represent optimum, minimum, and maximum respectively. Fine tuning like this is likely to be useful for fully justified
text. no browser currently supports multiple values for letter-spacing and word-spacing .

Note

Aligning Text Horizontally
Horizontal alignment is controlled by the text-align property. It accepts the following values:
left Align text to the left, and leave ragged ends on the right.
right Align text to the right, and leave ragged ends on the left.