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Stroke Text CSS: The Definitive Guide

Whenever I think of stroked text on the web I think: nope.

There is -webkit-text-stroke in CSS for it, but it places that stroke in the middle of the vector outline of the characters, absolutely ensuring that the character doesn’t look right. Just look at this in Chrome or Safari. Gross. If you’re going to do it, at least layer the correct type on top so it has its original integrity. And even then, well, it’s non-standard and you don’t get cross-browser support.

John Negoita covers text stroke in a bunch of other ways. Another way to fake it is to use text-shadow in multiple directions.

Four ways, like the figure above, doesn’t usually cut it, so he gets mathy with it. SVG is capable of doing strokes, which you’d think would be much smarter, but it has the same exact problem as CSS does with the straddled stroke — only with somewhat more control.

I’d probably avoid stroked text on the web in general, unless it’s just a one-off, in which case I’d make it into SVG in design software, fake the stroke, and use it as a background-image.

It is possible to look cool.

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A Trick That Makes Drawing SVG Lines Way Easier

When drawing lines with SVG, you often have a <path> element with a stroke. You set a stroke-dasharray that is as long as the path itself, as well as a stroke-offset that extends so far that you that it's initially hidden. Then you animate the stroke-offset back to 0 so you can watch it "draw" the shape.

Figuring out the length of the path is the trick, which fortunately you can do in JavaScript by selecting the path and doing pathEl.getTotalLength(). It'll probably be some weird decimal. A smidge unfortunate we can't get that in CSS, but c'est la vie.

Here's the trick!

You don't have to measure the length of the path, because you can set it.

So you do like:

<path d="M66.039,133.545 ... " pathLength="1" />

That doesn't do anything by itself (as far as I know). It's not like that only draws part of the path — it still draws the whole thing like as if you did nothing, only now the "math" of the path length is based on a value of 1.

Now we can set the stroke-dasharray to 1, and animate the offset in CSS! 

.path {
  stroke-dasharray: 1;
  stroke-dashoffset: 1;
  animation: dash 5s linear alternate infinite;
}

@keyframes dash {
  from {
    stroke-dashoffset: 1;
  }
  to {
    stroke-dashoffset: 0;
  }
}

Which works:

See the Pen
Basic Example of SVG Line Drawing, Backward and Forward by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

High five to Adam Haskell who emailed me about this a few months back.

Hey, speaking of SVG line drawing: Lemonade made a landing page for their 2019 charity that uses scroll-triggered SVG line drawing up and down the entire page. They did a behind-the-scenes look at it, which I always appreciate.

animated GIF of line drawing on Lemonade page - as page scrolls down a teddy bear shape is drawn

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iconsvg.xyz

There is a lot to like about Gaddafi Rusli's ICONSVG.

  1. It provides inline <svg>, which is the most generically useful way to deliver them, and probably how they should be used anyway. Each icon is a tiny amount of SVG and I'd bet they were all hand-golfed.
  2. They are all stroke-based, so they can be beefed up or slimmed down as needed.
  3. The stroke-linecap and stroke-linejoin properties can be adjusted, which presents an opportunity to make their edges sharper or more rounded. I often find icons that are close to what I want, but the weight isn't right or the edges are either too sharp or too round. This quick and easy configuration is awesome.

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