- In typography, an “em” is the width of an M, hence the name.
- In monospace fonts, all letters have the same width.
So: Why does monospace text with the CSS “max-width: 10em;” not wrap with a width of 10 characters?
Answer: it seems that, despite the name, 1em in CSS is actually the height of a letter in the default font size, e.g. 16px. Unless your letters are square, which is rather unusual (at least for Latin), 1em in CSS will be nothing like 1em in normal typography.
Anyone know why they did that?
Is it possible to use CSS to say “make the maximum width of this text 80 characters”? If not, why not (seems like a common requirement)? If so, how?