Wintersong — font-weight?

[Hawkeye]

Hi,

I'm just trying to understand what I'm "seeing" in this theme.

The font-weight for pretty much everything in the theme seems to be set at 300 or 400. From what I've read, 400 is "normal" with 300 being lighter/smaller. What I don't understand is why setting the font-weight any lower than 300 (say, 200 or 100) seems to have absolutely no effect on any text.

Is that a CSS thing, a font-specific thing, or is something in Wintersong preventing that?

Thanks,

Mark

[Tony @ AlphaBlossom]

Hello,

The Wintersong theme uses Robot Slab fonts from Google Fonts:

http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto+Slab

The font is available in font weights of 100, 300, 400 and 700. Those are your options, but only if they're included in the theme. I didn't check this theme but most likely in the functions.php file you'll see the font included, something like:

wp_enqueue_style( 'google-font-lato', '//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto+Slab:400,300,700', array(), CHILD_THEME_VERSION );

Since the function does not include the "100" weight, it will not be an option for your theme. It's best not to include it if you don't need it because it adds to your page load time and slow down your website.

Hope that helps!

Tony

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Tony Eppright | http://www.AlphaBlossom.com | Follow me on twitter @_alphablossom

[Hawkeye]

Awesome explanation Tony, and 100% spot-on. Here's the actual line from functions.php in Wintersong:

'//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto+Condensed:300|Roboto+Slab:300,400'

As you can see, the theme uses an even more minimalist approach than you hypothesized, but it's perfectly in keeping with what I saw when I tried to use values that aren't represented. From what I can tell almost all changes to font styling are handled in other ways, limiting the load of the font itself to those two sizes.

I'm also really glad I asked this question before I started fiddling around with changing the default font and completely confused myself.

Thanks again,

Mark

[Tony @ AlphaBlossom]

Hey Mark,

I'm glad it made sense despite my typos 😉

It's really easy to get carried away with fonts and try to include everything, but every little bit helps so if you can keep with only those that are necessary you'll be much better off for it!

Have a great night!

Tony

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Tony Eppright | http://www.AlphaBlossom.com | Follow me on twitter @_alphablossom

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