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Design Web Typography How to Choose and Use Webfonts Self-hosted Webfonts

David Regel
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David Regel
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 5,504 Points

How to apply fonts to the website

In this stage, we create seperate font-faces which all have the same font-family property. We also have different classes (.italic, .bold, .bold-italic). In the definition of those classes, we set the font-style and/or font-weight.

First question: How does the browser know which font-face we want to use?

Second question: Wouldn't it be better to create font-faces with different names and create classes which call a specific font-face name? By doing so, we could define all properties within the font-face declaration. Instead we set all properties twice, once in our font-faces and once in our classes.

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,184 Points

You tell the browser which font to use by setting the styling properties. There's an example of this being done in the CSS file in the video at about 5:38.

You could use different names for the different variants, but that would complicate switching styles and weights. To change either of those you would need to change the font-family instead. The styling would become confusing and non-standard and both CSS and JavaScript would need to be altered to work with correctly with fonts defined that way.