Text decoration is defined as decorating the glyphs of the text once typeset according to font and typographic rules.
CSS3 provides support for text decoration. This support comes in the form of underlines, text shadows and emphasis marks.
Earlier versions of the CSS specification for text decoration provides only very basic line decorations which were appropriate to Western typographical traditions.
When the line decorations are specified on a inline box, that box becomes a decorating box which would apply the decoration to all its fragments.
Let us now look at the various CSS3 properties to support text decoration.
text-decoration-line
This property specifies what line decorations are needed to an element. Valid values are:
none – Does not produce or stop text decoration
underline – all text is underlined
overline – the text has a line over it.
line-through – Each line of text has a line through the middle
blink – the text will blink.
text-decoration-color
This property specifies color of text decoration set on an element. Acceptable value is any valid ‘color’ value.
text-decoration-style
This property specifies the style of the line which is drawn. Valid values are: solid, double, dotted, dashed and wavy.
text-decoration
This is a shorthand to setting text-decoration-line, text-decoration-color and text-decoration-style.
text-decoration-skip
This property specifies the part of the element that the text decoration effect will not apply to. Valid values are:
Other values are “edges” and “box-decoration”.
text-underline-position
This property specifies the position of the underline on the element. Valid values are “auto”, “under”, “left”, and “right”.
text-emphasis-style
This property specifies the emphasis marks on the element’s text. Valid values are ‘none’, ‘filled’, ‘open’, ‘dot’, ‘circle’, ‘double-circle’, ‘triangle’, and ‘sesame’.
text-emphasis-color
This property specifies the color of the emphasis marks on the element’s text. All valid colors are acceptable values.
text-emphasis-position
This property specifies the position of the emphasis marks on the element’s text. The valid values are ‘over’, ‘under’, ‘right’, and ‘left’.
text-shadow
The property is used to specify shadow effect to be applied to the text of the element.
Example of text decoration
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta charset=”utf-8″>
<style>
span{
text-emphasis-style: filled dot;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>We expect a dot above every single character of ” sample”.</p>
<div><span>sample</span></div>
</body></html>
Summary
In this article, we learned about CSS3 text decoration module. I hope you found this information useful.
About the author
Vipul Patel is a technology geek based in Seattle. He can be reached at vipul.patel@hotmail.com. You can visit his LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/vipul-patel/6/675/508
References
http://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-decor-3/
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