How to Create Bold Text With HTML

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HTML makes it easy to bold text, and there are several tags you can learn if you want more options. Better yet, you can take a few minutes to learn some basic CSS and add it directly to your HTML document. This is quicker than adding a whole CSS stylesheet, and will give you more control over exactly how thick the bolded text displays.

Method 1
Method 1 of 2:

Creating Bold Text with HTML

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  1. In HTML5, the preferred standard, the strong tag is recommended for important text. This is almost always displayed as bold text in browsers.
    • Place the text you want bolded in between these tags: <strong> bold text here </strong>.
  2. "Headings" are usually placed at the top of the web page or at the beginning of a new section. Usually, headings are displayed as bold and larger than the regular font, but this can vary. There are six different heading tags, from <h1> to <h6>. Follow these guidelines when using them:
    • The h1 tag, written <h1> Your Heading Here </h1> is the most important heading, typically the largest text at the top of the page.
    • <h2> The h2 tag </h2> is for the second most important heading, and so on down to <h6> h6, the smallest </h6>.
    • Use these sparingly, only to organize your page. Users should be able to skim the headings quickly and find the topic they're looking for.
    • When creating subheadings, move down just one level at a time. In other words, don't skip from <h1> to <h3>. This helps the HTML page preserve its formatting when transferred to another format. [1]
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  3. The <b> tag is still supported in HTML5, but <strong> is preferred in most situations. Use the <b> tag only when the text should be bolded for stylistic reasons, not to add emphasis. Examples include key words or vocabulary words in a passage, or product names in a review. [2]
    • As with most tags, <b>place the affected text between a start tag and an end tag</b>.
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Method 2
Method 2 of 2:

Creating Bold Text with Inline CSS

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  1. CSS is a more powerful and consistent way to style your web page. This makes it the ideal way to determine how your page looks , while HTML is designed to determine what your page means . It's completely fine to use HTML tags when you want to emphasize important text, but CSS will give you more close control over the visual appearance of your bold text.
    • Try opening a basic HTML page with different browsers, and you might notice differences in the display. CSS tells the browser exactly how to display text altered by a given tag, to minimize the amount of variation.
  2. If you don't know CSS yet, using "inline CSS" is a good way to get started. While you can use this to alter tags such as <p> or <h1>, sometimes you'll want to change text that's not already between tags. [3] In this case, place the text between <span></span> tags. This has no effect on its own, but gives us something to work with. Here's the example we'll be using:
    • <span>I learned how to make this text bold with inline CSS.</span>
  3. HTML attributes are written directly in the tag, inside the < >brackets. The style attribute is necessary to insert CSS into the HTML tag, so we'll insert style= into the span tag:
    • <span style=>I learned how to make this text bold with inline CSS.</span>
    • There's no reason to add the style attribute without specifying any styles. We're just taking this one step at a time to make it easy to follow.
  4. CSS properties are added as part of the style attribute. In our case, we'll use the font-weight property, which determines how thick to draw the font. This single property can be used to display bold (extra-thick) text, thin text, or even specify that the text should be displayed with normal thickness. Add "font-weight: " after the = sign, like this:
    • <span style="font-weight: ">I learned how to make this text bold with inline CSS.</span>
    • Again, this is unfinished and won't do anything by itself.
    • Don't forget the quotation marks before and after font-weight: .
  5. The only thing we need to do now is add a value for font-weight, between the font-weight: and the final quotation mark. There are quite a few options for different amounts of "boldness," but the value bold is the easiest to use : [4]
    • <span style="font-weight:bold"> I learned how to make this text bold with inline CSS. </span>
  6. CSS gives you many more options than HTML, so you don't need to feel constricted. Here are several alternatives to the "bold" value: [5]
    • <span style="font-weight:bolder"> "Bolder" text will always be thicker than the parent element. </span> For example, if you make an entire paragraph "bold," then use "bolder" on an individual sentence inside that paragraph, it will be even thicker.
    • <span style="font-weight:normal"> "Normal" text will be displayed as normal even if the span is inside a bold tag. </span>
    • <span style="font-weight:900"> You can instead use a number from 100 to 900 to specify thickness. 400 is normal text, while bold text uses a thickness of 700 by default. </span> [6]
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    How do I change the image size?
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    Try adding a width and/or height attribute in the image tag. I would recommend using one or the other so your image doesn't get squashed or stretched.
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    How do I make one letter bold?
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    You can select the letter with a span element and set the span element to apply a bold face.
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      Tips

      • When using the font-weight property in CSS, only use numerical values that are multiples of 100. Values that are in between will be rounded up. [7]
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      • An embedded or external CSS sheet is an even better way to bold text, since it allows you to alter and easily change an entire document at once.
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      • Each font only has certain "font weights" available. When using CSS, the closest available font weight to the specified amount is used. This means you won't always see a difference between two thicker than normal font weights.
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      References

      1. ↑ http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/headers/
      2. ↑ http://www.quackit.com/html/codes/bold/
      3. ↑ http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/core-attributes/style
      4. ↑ http://www.quackit.com/css/properties/css_font-weight.cfm
      5. ↑ http://www.quackit.com/css/properties/css_font-weight.cfm
      6. ↑ http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_font_weight.asp
      7. ↑ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-weight

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