Font Family

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What Does Font Family Mean?

A font family is a set of fonts that have a common design. Fonts within a family, however, differ from each other in style such as the weight (light, normal, bold, semi-bold, etc.) and the slant (roman or upright, italic and oblique). An example of a font family is Times New Roman, which consists of a roman, italic, bold and bold italic version of the same typeface.

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Techopedia Explains Font Family

The stroke width and serif characteristics of a font differ from family to family. In Windows, fonts are categorized into six font family names:

  • Decorative (a novelty font)
  • Modern (a monospaced, fixed-width or non-proportional font)
  • Roman (a proportional serif font)
  • Script (a cursive or handwriting-like font)
  • Swiss (a proportional sans serif font)
  • Dontcare (a generic font)

In CSS, font-family is a property of an element that consists of a list of font family names and/or generic family names that are applied to the element. The first item in the list is the default; the rest are used as fallbacks.

In HTML and XHTML, font family is an attribute of an element that indicates the font to be used when rendering the text value of the element.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.