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Font Style

Font style refers to normal, italic, or oblique styles within a type family. Normal style is sometimes referred to as roman or upright style in printing, but the correct syntax is normal for web page coding.

Normal, italic, and oblique are classifications chosen by the font creator and are coded into the font.

You often won’t see much (if any) difference between an oblique style and italic style. Oblique is a roman font that has been skewed a certain number of degrees (usually 8-12 degrees). An italic font is created by the type designer with specific characters (usually lowercase) drawn differently.

Here’s an example of each style:

Normal | Italic | Oblique

Do you see any different between the italic and oblique styles? To me the oblique is slanted just a smidge more.

If an oblique or italic version of the font isn’t available, it is usually artificially generated by slanting the normal font. A generated style usually isn’t as easy to read as true italic or oblique font, so it’s wise not to overuse the italic or oblique styles. Also, sometimes an oblique style is simply ignored by the browser, so it will appear as a normal font style.

Here’s how to set the font style using those keywords:

In addition to using CSS to style elements with those keywords, there's also the HTML <i> and <em> tags which also italicize text. Check out the italic text tutorial for more.