CSS Font Border?

With all the new CSS3 border stuff going on (-webkit, ...) is it now possible to add a border to your font? (Like the solid white border around the blue Twitter logo). If not, are there any not-too-ugly hacks that will accomplish this in CSS/XHTML or do I still need to fire up Photoshop?

There's an experimental CSS property called text-stroke, supported on some browsers behind a -webkit prefix.

h1 {
    -webkit-text-stroke: 2px black; /* width and color */

    font-family: sans; color: yellow;
}

<h1>Hello World</h1>

Another possible trick would be to use four shadows, one pixel each on all directions, using property text-shadow:

h1 {
    /* 1 pixel black shadow to left, top, right and bottom */
    text-shadow: -1px 0 black, 0 1px black, 1px 0 black, 0 -1px black;

    font-family: sans; color: yellow;
}

<h1>Hello World</h1>

But it would get blurred for more than 1 pixel thickness.

UPDATE

Here's a SCSS mixin to generate the stroke: http://codepen.io/pixelass/pen/gbGZYL

/// Stroke font-character
/// @param  {Integer} $stroke - Stroke width
/// @param  {Color}   $color  - Stroke color
/// @return {List}            - text-shadow list
@function stroke($stroke, $color) {
  $shadow: ();
  $from: $stroke*-1;
  @for $i from $from through $stroke {
   @for $j from $from through $stroke {
      $shadow: append($shadow, $i*1px $j*1px 0 $color, comma);
    }
  }
  @return $shadow;
}
/// Stroke font-character
/// @param  {Integer} $stroke - Stroke width
/// @param  {Color}   $color  - Stroke color
/// @return {Style}           - text-shadow
@mixin stroke($stroke, $color) {
  text-shadow: stroke($stroke, $color);
}

enter image description here

YES old question.. with accepted (and good) answers..

BUT...In case anybody ever needs this and hates typing code...

THIS is a 2px black border with CrossBrowser support (not IE) I needed this for @fontface fonts so it needed to be cleaner than previous seen answers... I takes every side pixelwise to make sure there are (almost) no gaps for "fuzzy" (handrawn or similar) fonts. Subpixels (0.5px) could be added but I don't need it.

Long code for just the border??? ...YES!!!

text-shadow: 1px 1px 0 #000,
    -1px 1px 0 #000,
    1px -1px 0 #000,
    -1px -1px 0 #000,
    0px 1px 0 #000,
    0px -1px 0 #000,
    -1px 0px 0 #000,
    1px 0px 0 #000,
    2px 2px 0 #000,
    -2px 2px 0 #000,
    2px -2px 0 #000,
    -2px -2px 0 #000,
    0px 2px 0 #000,
    0px -2px 0 #000,
    -2px 0px 0 #000,
    2px 0px 0 #000,
    1px 2px 0 #000,
    -1px 2px 0 #000,
    1px -2px 0 #000,
    -1px -2px 0 #000,
    2px 1px 0 #000,
    -2px 1px 0 #000,
    2px -1px 0 #000,
    -2px -1px 0 #000;

You could perhaps emulate a text-stroke, using the css text-shadow (or -webkit-text-shadow/-moz-text-shadow) and a very low blur:

#element
{
  text-shadow: 0 0 2px #000; /* horizontal-offset vertical-offset 'blur' colour */
  -moz-text-shadow: 0 0 2px #000;
  -webkit-text-shadow: 0 0 2px #000;
}

But while this is more widely available than the -webkit-text-stroke property, I doubt that it's available to the majority of your users, but that might not be a problem (graceful degradation, and all that).

CSS Font Border?

UPDATE

Related

Recent Posts