The font-weight property sets the weight, or thickness, of a font and is dependent either on available font faces within a font family or weights defined by the browser.
span {
font-weight: bold;
}The font-weight property accepts either a keyword value or predefined numeric value. The available keywords are:
normalboldbolderlighter
The available numeric values are:
100200300400500600700800900
The keyword value normal maps to the numeric value 400 and the value bold maps to 700.
In order to see any effect using values other than 400 or 700, the font being used must have built-in faces that match those specified weights.
If a font has a bold (“700”) or normal (“400”) version as part of the font family, the browser will use that. If those are not available, the browser will mimic its own bold or normal version of the font. It will not mimic the other unavailable weights. Fonts often use names like “Regular” and “Light” to identify any alternate font weights.
The following demo demonstrates the use of the alternate weight values:
The above demo is using the free font Open Sans, embedded using the Google Web Fonts API. The font is loaded with all the available font weights and so, using the font-weight property, the different available weights are displayed as described by each paragraph’s text. The unavailable weights simply display the logically closest weight.
Common fonts like Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, etc. do not have weights other than 400 and 700. So the same demo displayed with one of those fonts would display only two weights in the nine paragraphs.
Using “bolder” and “lighter” keywords
The keyword values bolder and lighter are relative to the computed font weight of the parent element. The browser will look for the closest “bolder” or “lighter” weight, depending on what is available in the font family, otherwise it will simply choose “400” or “700”, depending on which makes the most sense.
Child elements will not inherit the “bolder” and “lighter” keyword values, but instead will inherit the computed weight.
Related Properties
Browser support
Other resources
Related
font
font-family
font-size
font-stretch
.element { font-stretch: ultra-condensed; }
font-style
font-variant
{ p:first-letter: font-variant: small-caps; }
font-variant-numeric
.fraction { font-variant-numeric: diagonal-fractions; }
font-weight
span { font-weight: 800; }
line-height
.element { line-height: 1.35; }
Hello, thanks for the article! I am still little confused – bolder should be more than bold, so it may be 800,900?
No, not necessarily. “bolder” is not an absolute weight, but is relative to the existing font’s boldness. So it could map to 700, if the font starts at a regular weight. It’s a little confusing, but just realize it’s not relative to the “bold” keyword, it’s relative to the boldness (or lightness) of the font, whatever that currently is.
Great article as it points out the many browser support problems that I have been having. I found certain browsers were not reading the same font weights, even when declaring the varying weights with a link tag in the head. Google Chrome seems to ignore the font weight 400 even with a supported google font weight at 400.
The only solution I found was to declare these weights as “normal” to get it to work but it confused me as to why it was happening where in all other browsers it works fine. It may just be this particular font but it certainly puzzled me.
Hello,
can i use different font-weights for different browsers? I use the FF Dagny Pro font via typekit in light and it is a good read in Safari, but a terrible one in Firefox. So i would use
font-weight: 200; for Safari and for other Browsersfont-weight:400;Is it possible to do that? Thanks!
I don’t recommend that, but you’d have to use a browser hack:
http://browserhacks.com/
I don’t know off hand if there’s one you can use for what you want, but you can search that site. You could also use UA detection, but that’s even worse.
Best choice: Use a weight that looks pretty good everywhere, even if not perfect.
Why css bold keword not working without span, but
font-weight: normal;is working.tunne unnu
In Win7 with Chrome and Open Sans 300,400 and 600 included it just shows two variations(400 and 700). So, Louis’ recommendation to use a font-weight which shows up nice in all situations is the best practical solution.
NOOOOOOBS THIS IS EASY
In Open sans Demo though the 600 version is available both 600 and 700 almost look same.
I am working on a project which is using open sans from google fonts i used 600 weighted variant for navigation bar and after some day they started looking like 700. Is there any problem in google fonts style sheets or they are not serving proper fonts.
Thanks for the write-up on this. I’m actually trying to find out the way that Photoshop handles the use of their bold button – definitely don’t think it’s using the bold variation from the actual font unfortunately.
Johannesburg Website Design,
Thoman
Note that according to the W3C specifications the keywords ‘bolder’ and ‘lighter’ do not use every possible variant available in the font. Instead for ‘bolder’ only 400, 700 and 900 and for ‘lighter’ only 100, 400 and 700 are used.
See for example “Meaning of relative weights” here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-weight
It’s 2018 and you finally answered what I’ve been looking up for 2 days. So bolder & lighter are relative to current font weight. Why doesn’t 3wschools just say that! Thank you!!
Hi! I noticed how the typeface is deformed by the font-weight rules in Linux (Chrome/Chromium and Firefox at least), they glyph height is decreased in some cases as the font-weight increases. I guess it’s some kind of ugly bug.
Screenshot: http://oi63.tinypic.com/2lsi0xh.jpg
Notice the height of the capital “T” letter related to the “h” letter, also the numbers.