how to set font size based on container size?
I have a container that has a % width and height, so it scales depending on external factors. I would like the font inside the container to be a constant size relative to the size of containers. Is there any good way to do this using CSS? The font-size: x% would only scale the font according to the original font size (which would be 100%).
Answer
If you want to set the font-size as a percentage of the viewport width, use the vwunit:
#mydiv { font-size: 5vw; }
The other alternative is to use SVG embedded in the HTML. It will just be a few lines. The font-size attribute to the text element will be interpreted as "user units", for instance those the viewport is defined in terms of. So if you define viewport as 0 0 100 100, then a font-size of 1 will be one one-hundredth of the size of the svg element.
And no, there is no way to do this in CSS using calculations. The problem is that percentages used for font-size, including percentages inside a calculation, are interpreted in terms of the inherited font size, not the size of the container. CSS could use a unit called bw (box-width) for this purpose, so you could say div { font-size: 5bw; }, but I've never heard this proposed.