Style the First Letter

By Stephen Bucaro

Use the :first-letter pseudo-element to define a special style for the first letter in a container element such as a paragraph. Pseudo-elements are used to refer to html elements that are not available in the document tree. For example, there is no first-letter element in an html document.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

The basic code for this is shown below.

<style type="text/css">
p:first-letter
{
color: blue;
font-size:2em;
font-weight:bold;
}
</style>

However, this code would apply the first-letter style to every paragraph on the webpage. Instead define a class to apply to only the paragraphs where you want the special style, as shown below.

<style type="text/css">
p.first:first-letter
{
color: blue;
font-size:2em;
font-weight:bold;
}
</style>

<p class="first" style="text-indent:2em;">Now is the time
for all good men to come to the aid of their country.</p>

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

- Note that I also added an inline style rule to indent the text.

- Note the units that I used is em (representing the width of a capital M). Using this unit allows the user to change their default font size without distoring the relative size of the first letter to the other letters in the paragraph.

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