In typography,leading is an amount of space included above and below text to provide spacing between lines. Historically, in physical typesetting, pieces of actuallead were used to implement this spacing, which is where the name comes from.

In CSS, typographic leading is the difference between the content height and the line-height, generally set by theline-height property. Leading set vialine-height provides spacing between lines, which can be negative. The space is distributed equally above and below the text, which is referred to ashalf-leading.

The area of a font above the cap baseline is referred to as theover edge. The area below thealphabetic baseline is referred to as theunder edge. Likewise, the half-leading above and below a line is referred to as theover leading andunder leading, respectively.

The half-leading can be trimmed from the block-start edge and block-end edge of a text element's block container using thetext-box properties.

See also

• line-height
• text-box
• CSS inline layout module
• Leading on Wikipedia
• The Thing With Lead­ing in CSS on matthiasott.com (2022)