What does 12px/13px do in css font declarations?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What does this CSS shorthand font syntax mean?

I saw many people doing that:

body {
font: bold 12px/13px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

What is this 12px/13px for?

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 04 '11 at 12:45

15

12px is the font size and 13px the line height.

Example of declaring all font properties in a one liner here.

All this being said, I'll just add that this is a pretty unusual way of writing it and I wouldn't recommend it since it might confuse most developers.

answered Jan 04 '11 at 12:45

marcgg

65,020
52
178
231

3

Learning alternative syntaxes in languages that I've been supposedly mastering for years makes me feel really ashamed :-) – Álvaro González Jan 04 '11 at 12:51

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 04 '11 at 12:47

2

The 12px is the height of the font in pixels. The 13px is the height of the line in pixels.

answered Jan 04 '11 at 12:47

Mike Chess

2,758
5
29
37

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 04 '11 at 13:41

You might see something like

body { font:13px/1.231 sans-serif; *font-size:small; }

Notice there is no "px" after 1.231 and the line height in this case will be 123.1% of the text size. This is used to unify native line-heights that might otherwise be larger or smaller that you'd want them.

What does 12px/13px do in css font declarations?

3 Answers3