typography.js

A powerful toolkit for building websites with beautiful design

KyleAMathews
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JavaScript

Typography.js Build Status Coverage Status

A powerful toolkit for building websites with beautiful design.

Install

npm install typography

Demo/playground

https://kyleamathews.github.io/typography.js

Why

The goal of Typography.js is to provide a high-level elegant API for
expressing typographic design intent.

Typography is a complex system of interrelated styles. 100s of style
declarations on dozens of elements must be in harmonious order. Trying
one design change can mean making dozens of tedious recalculations and
CSS value changes. Creating new Typography themes with CSS feels hard.

Typography.js provides a vastly simpler way to define and
explore typography designs.

You provide configuration to the Typography.js JS api and it uses its
Typography engine to generate CSS for block and inline
elements.

Typography.js makes it easy to create designs that are unique, personal, and
custom to your project.

Themes & Plugins

  • themes: Typography.js themes are simple Javascript objects. As
    such they’re easy to share across projects or even
    open source and share via
    NPM    .
  • plugins: Plugins are functions that extend or modify the core
    Typography engine. They can change how headers are styled
    or add specialized styles e.g. for code or tables.

Sites that use Typography.js

Javascript usage

import Typography from 'typography'

const typography = new Typography({
  baseFontSize: '18px',
  baseLineHeight: 1.45,
  headerFontFamily: ['Avenir Next', 'Helvetica Neue', 'Segoe UI', 'Helvetica', 'Arial', 'sans-serif'],
  bodyFontFamily: ['Georgia', 'serif'],
  // See below for the full list of options.
})

// Output CSS as string.
typography.toString()

// Or insert styles directly into the <head> (works well for client-only
// JS web apps.)
typography.injectStyles()

Themes

We maintain 30 (and counting) themes that are ready to use on your next
project. These are each published as separate NPM packages. Explore
themes at http://kyleamathews.github.io/typography.js.

Using themes

Here’s an example of how to use the Funston theme.

  1. First save the package to your project npm install --save typography-theme-funston
  2. Then import and pass into Typography when initializing.
import Typography from 'typography'
import funstonTheme from 'typography-theme-funston'

const typography = new Typography(funstonTheme)

Customizing themes

Themes are just javascript objects so it’s easy to modify them as
needed. For example, if you’re using the Funston theme but want to
increase the base font size slightly:

import Typography from 'typography'
import funstonTheme from 'typography-theme-funston'
funstonTheme.baseFontSize = '22px' // was 20px.

const typography = new Typography(funstonTheme)

Or you can use the imperative API overrideThemeStyles to directly set/override
styles on a theme:

import Typography from 'typography'
import funstonTheme from 'typography-theme-funston'
funstonTheme.overrideThemeStyles = ({ rhythm }, options) => ({
  'h2,h3': {
    marginBottom: rhythm(1/2),
    marginTop: rhythm(2),
  }
})

const typography = new Typography(funstonTheme)

Published Typography.js Themes

Plugins

Plugins are functions that extend or modify the core typography engine.
they can change how headers are styled or add specialized styles e.g.
for code or tables. Currently there’s one plugin available,
typography-plugin-code.

To use the Code plugin, first install using NPM.

npm install --save typography-plugin-code

Then add to your theme before creating a new typography object.

import Typography from 'typography'
import CodePlugin from 'typography-plugin-code'
import sternGroveTheme from 'typography-theme-stern-grove'

sternGroveTheme.plugins = [
  new CodePlugin(),
]

const typography = new Typography(sternGroveTheme)

React.js helper components.

Typography.js includes two helper components for your React.js projects,
TypographyStyle and GoogleFont. These are ideal for
server-rendering.

  • TypographyStyle creates a style element and inserts the generated
    CSS for your theme.
  • GoogleFont creates the link element to include the Google Fonts &
    weights specified in your theme.

To use, first install the package npm install --save react-typography
then import them into your html.js file.

import { TypographyStyle, GoogleFont } from 'react-typography'
// Best practice is to have a typography module
// where you define your theme.
import typography from 'utils/typography'

// Inside your React.js HTML component.
<html>
  <head>
    <TypographyStyle typography={typography} />
    <GoogleFont typography={typography} />
  </head>
  <body>
    // stuff
  </body>
</html>

Using with create-react-app

If you use the default create-react-app template, the above React.js
solution will not work, and the typography.injectStyles() solution
will not enable Google Fonts… A workaround is to install
typography-inject-fonts and do

import Typography from 'typography'
import funstonTheme from 'typography-theme-funston'
import injectFonts from 'typography-inject-fonts'

const typography = new Typography(funstonTheme)
typography.injectStyles()
injectFonts(typography)

API

Configuration

When creating a new instance of Typography, you can pass in a
configuration object. All configuration keys are optional.

  • title: The theme title.
  • baseFontSize: The base font size in pixels, defaults to 16px.
  • baseLineHeight: The base line height using the css unitless number, defaults to 1.45.
  • scaleRatio: The “scale ratio” for the theme. This value is the ratio
    between the h1 font size and the baseFontSize. So if the scale ratio is 2
    and the baseFontSize is 16px then the h1 font size is 32px.
{
  scaleRatio: 2,
}
  • googleFonts: An array specifying Google Fonts for this project.
googleFonts: [
  {
    name: 'Montserrat',
    styles: [
      '700',
    ],
  },
  {
    name: 'Merriweather',
    styles: [
      '400',
      '400i',
      '700',
      '700i',
    ],
  },
],
  • headerFontFamily: An array of strings specifying the font family
    stack for headers e.g. ['Helvetica', 'sans-serif']. Defaults to a
    system UI font stack.
  • bodyFontFamily: An array of strings specifying the font family
    stack for the body, defaults to ['georgia', 'serif'].
  • headerColor: A css color string to be set on headers. Defaults
    to inherit.
  • bodyColor: A css color string to be set for body text. Defaults
    to hsl(0,0%,0%,0.8).
  • headerWeight: Specify the font weight for headers. Defaults to
    bold.
  • bodyWeight: Specify the font weight for body text. Defaults to
    normal.
  • boldWeight: Specify the font weight for “bold” (b, strong, dt, th)
    elements. Defaults to bold.
  • blockMarginBottom: Specify the default margin-bottom for block
    elements. Defaults to one “rhythm unit” (i.e. the height of the base line height).
  • includeNormalize: Include normalize.css.
    Normalize.css is an excellent project which works to normalize the
    base browser CSS across browsers and serves as an excellent foundation
    for Typography.js. We include normalize.CSS by default but if you’re
    already including it elsewhere in your project, you can disable
    including it here by passing false.
  • overrideStyles: Imperative API for directly adding to or
    overriding auto-generated styles. It’s called with a Vertical
    Rhythm object, the options object, and the algorithmically generated
    styles.
overrideStyles: ({ adjustFontSizeTo, rhythm }, options, styles) => ({
  h1: {
    fontFamily: ['Montserrat', 'sans-serif'].join(','),
  },
  blockquote: {
    ...adjustFontSizeTo('19px'),
    color: gray(41),
    fontStyle: 'italic',
    paddingLeft: rhythm(13/16),
    marginLeft: rhythm(-1),
    borderLeft: `${rhythm(3/16)} solid ${gray(10)}`,
  },
  'blockquote > :last-child': {
    marginBottom: 0,
  },
})
  • overrideThemeStyles: This has the same function signature as
    overrideStyles but should be used in place of overrideStyles when
    using a 3rd-party theme so as to not delete the theme’s own
    overrideStyles function.
overrideThemeStyles: ({ rhythm }, options, styles) => ({
  'h2,h3': {
    marginBottom: rhythm(1/2),
    marginTop: rhythm(2),
  }
})

Related

Developing Typography.js

Typography.js is a monorepo facilitated by
Lerna.

TODO: document constants + compass-vertical-rhythm + using typgraphy.js
for inline styles.

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