Changing font family in default Twenty Twelve theme

Sounds like your site is on WordPress.COM?? There are no paid upgrades for self-hosted WP sites — which is what these forums are for.

i am on self hosted – ok so nothing can be done? Thanks for your reply

If you are on self hosted, create a child theme and modify the stylesheet.

See this re: creating a child theme:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Child_Themes

Doing so will avoid losing all your changes when WP is updated.

Hey that’s pretty cool –

I feel pretty competent with CSS – before I dive into this (later on today) can you guys chime in and tell me the level of difficulty?

All I really want to do is blend the font into my own site – i use Google fonts – that should be pretty easy right? Thanks

Yes, once you create a child theme, you’d just need to add the CSS code for the new font to the new style.css file — the only thing that sometimes trips people up is that the new code has to be at least as specific as the existing code so that the old code does not override the new code because of the selectors. But if you know CSS, you’ll likely be home free!

And yes, Child Themes are pretty cool…and really not hard to set up. Just follow the instructions carefully and you should be fine. If you run into anything, just post back.

so its possible just to simply copy and paste the existing parent CSS and then modify JUST the font and I am home free?

Yes, that’s possible, though really, you don’t want to duplicate CSS unnecessarily. In this case, the default code is this:

body {
	font-size: 14px;
	font-size: 1rem;
	font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
	color: #444;
}

if you are only changing the fonts, just put this in the new style.css file:

body {
	font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

Don’t forget:

body.custom-font-enabled {
	font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

2012 enqueues open sans through functions.php. The file is commented to discuss. I believe you could just dequeue the font, enqueue your own, and then modify the css

Amazing advice thanks!

One question – what about if the font that I wanted to add was a Google Font?

I understand that the font-family: can refer direct to the Google font – but where would I place this?

<link href=’https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Ubuntu&#8217; rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>

THANKS Again

You can hook it to wp_head.

I did this for the twenty ten theme but the steps should be the same.
https://wpadventures.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/ubuntu-font/

thanks very much ill try that

I would not add <link href=’https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Ubuntu&#8217; rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’> to header.php. Like the moderator said when/if you upgrade the theme the external link to googles CSS file is lost.

I have been working on a similar project (to help me understand how the wordpress hierarchy works).

The best way to add the google link to the header of the WordPress DOM is to create a functions.php file in the child theme, and add php code to make it more dynamic.

function load_google_fonts() {
		wp_register_style('googleFontsUbuntu','https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family= Ubuntu');
            wp_enqueue_style( 'googleFontsUbuntu');
}

add_action('wp_print_styles', 'load_google_fonts');

So to help me process this in my head, within a separate functions.php in the child theme (not the main theme) a function is written registering the font and then it is enqueued. Finally you add the action to print out the fonts.

For the record I know there is a Google fonts plugin I could use, but I want to figure this way out for learning purposes…

Where I am is now I can see the twenty twelve-child css links in the header when I view the source- so I know my google fonts are loaded and ready to be used, but I cannot get the right css properties to override the Open Sans, Helvetica… font-family.

I have found the main font-family properties in the main theme’s style.css, so I just override them by specifying them within the styles.css in the -child folder:

@import url(../twentytwelve/style.css);

body {
	font-family: Marck+Script, Roboto, Averia+Libre, sans-serif;
	}
body.custom-font-enabled {
	font-family: Marck+Script, Roboto, Averia+Libre, sans-serif;
	}
.entry-content code,
.comment-content code {
	font-family: Marck+Script, Roboto, Averia+Libre, sans-serif;
	}

.entry-content pre,
.comment-content pre {
	font-family: Marck+Script, Roboto, Averia+Libre, sans-serif;
	}

body,
input,
textarea,
.page-title span,
.pingback a.url {
	font-family: Marck+Script, Roboto, Averia+Libre, sans-serif;
	}

Nothing changes. I am lost, anybody have a suggestion? Thank you ??

@tryah85 – posting in old threads isn’t a good way to get help – please start a new thread per

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Forum_Welcome#Where_To_Post

Opps, sorry. See this new thread.