Changing jQuery UI Button size?

I've been using the jQuery UI button all over my page, however I haven't found a way around what seems to be a simple problem. I want some of my buttons to be smaller than the other, this should be as simple as setting the CSS of the button text to something like, font: .8em; However jQuery UI takes your DOM element and wraps it:

<button class="ui-button ui-button-text-only ui-widget ui-state-default ui-corner-all">
   <span class="ui-button-text">Button Label</span>
</button>

So if I have a <button class="small-button">Small button!</button> jQuery will place the text in a child span. Any font size given to the small-button class will be ignored.

There's got to be a way around this without hacking at how jQuery makes its buttons. Any ideas?

Solution 1:

If it's styling ui-button-text with font-size directly, you can override it at a higher level by applying !important. Such as:

.small-button {
   font-size: .8em !important;
}

EDIT: try setting a CSS style directly on .ui-button-text to inherit:

.ui-button-text {
   font-size: inherit !important;
} 

This should also make the !important on the .small-button irrelevant.

Solution 2:

This helped decrease the height of the button for me (Smoothness theme default is line-height of 1.4):

.ui-button .ui-button-text
{
 line-height: 1.0;
}

Solution 3:

Here is what I use in my websites to setup the font-sizes so that my button sizes are the same as on the jQuery UI website. This works because it's exactly how the jQuery UI website does it!

/* percentage to px scale (very simple)
 80% =  8px
100% = 10px
120% = 12px
140% = 14px
180% = 18px
240% = 24px
260% = 26px
*/

body
{
    font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size:10px;
}

By setting the font-size properties like that for the body element, setting the font-size for everything else becomes trivial as 100% = 10px.

Just watch out for the cascading effect when using percentages - a child element's 100% will be equal to the parent element's font-size.