Custom Text Highlighting with CSS

Marius Reimer
1 min readApr 26, 2020

Some websites do different things to highlight specific text phrases. This could be text that the user should pay attention at (like a warning), or is just very important (like an item price). I was curious on how to do that.

The solution is very simple: via CSS, background image and inline span. First, you need to create the image that you want to put as a highlight behind your text. I just used Gimp and a brush tool until I was okay with the result. The image has to be exported as a scalable vector graphic (svg).

After the image is created, you could either keep it as a file or convert it to a base64 string to be used within css. Important is, that the background-image resizes by covering the element, does not repeat and is centered.

CSS Custom Text Highlighting

With some additional padding you can adjust the free space of the image a bit.

Originally published at https://mariusreimer.com on April 26, 2020.

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Marius Reimer

React Native Mobile Developer since 2017 // Freelancer