HTML Italics Tutorial: How to Italicize Your Web Content Without a Visual Editor?

As we all know, digital readers are skimmers.

They only skim through vital parts rather than reading the full content.

As a result, font styles like bold, italics, and underlining are more used to style online content.

An NCBI study found that italics and colors are crucial web usability factors for young adults.

Content management platforms like WordPress can easily format your content with a click.

But, when you aren’t working with visual editors, HTML is your only option.

Styling content with HTML tags is a simple process.

But, if you are new to HTML, this guide can help you use HTML italics correctly. So, let’s dig in.

What’s HTML?

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the programming language used to design documents for web browsers display.

It works with other styling languages such as JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style your text.

The main purpose of HTML is to structure your web content using tags for easy readability.

What’s an HTML Italics Tag?

The HTML italics (<i>) tag helps to display the content in italic style.

This tag is useful to highlight the technical term, words, or important points in the content.

The <i> tag is an opening tag that encases your italics content.

This tag is incomplete without a closing tag — </i>.

The styling effect will only work with opening and closing tags.

 The HTML italics tag works as follows:

<i> Content </i>

Is It Hard to Create Italics using HTML?

No, it isn’t hard to create italics using HTML.

If you know the basics of HTML, italicizing is an easy process.

HTML has two tags to italicize the text — i and em tags.

The em tag is an emphasis tag that you can use to emphasize the part in your content when reading.

In addition, you can also use the CSS font-style property to style your text.

What’s the Difference Between the <i> and <em> Tags in HTML?

The <i> and <em> tags appear the same in web browsers. But they hold different meanings.

The <em> tag helps to emphasize the content element. It is useful when you want to put stress on a word, line, or paragraph.

Here’s how <em> tag works:

<p>Stop messing around and just <em>clean</em> your room now. </p>

As you can see, the em tag emphasizes the word ‘clean.’

In comparison, the i tag only italics a text without extra emphasis.

How Long Does It Take to Create Italics using HTML?

It isn’t time-consuming to use the HTML italics tag.

You have to encase your text in <i></i>, and that’s it.

It depends upon your typing speed, to be honest.

The faster you type, the quicker you can create italics using HTML.

When You Need to Italics Your Content?

People often use italics in a blog design to highlight important content parts.

However, most people use italics based on their personal preferences.

Though, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for using HTML italics.

But you can use italics in content as follows:

• Emphasizing a word or phrase in a block of content.
• Italicize the title of bullet points.
• Use italics to highlight parts in quotation marks.
• When you want to write a word of one language in another, like “Some Hindi words are taken from the Sanskrit language.”
• You can italicize proper nouns in the sentence, like California, Mahatma Gandhi, etc.
• When you have to write the word to make it sound, for example — “There was a sharp tring-tring.”

How to Apply Italics in HTML?

Let’s check the clear steps to apply italics in HTML using italic and emphasis tags separately.

Method 1. Apply HTML Italics Using the Italic Tag

• Step 1. Type an open paragraph tag (<p>) and enter your text.
• Step 2. Then, write <i> tag before the text part you want to italics.
• Step 3. After writing the italicized text, close the italic tag — </i>.
• Step 4. Type the remaining of your paragraph text. In the end, use </p> to complete the paragraph.

Here’s a look at this example for a better understanding:

<p>The city that never sleeps is<i> New York</i>.</p>

Result:

Method 2. Apply HTML Italics Using the Emphasis Tag

• Step 1. Type your paragraph text between <p></p> tags.
• Step 2. Then, enclose the word or phrase you want to emphasize in these tags — <em></em>.

Here’s an emphasis tag example:

<p>What have you<em>done</em>, fool?</p>

Result:

Method 3. Apply HTML Italics Using CSS

Do you know the basics of CSS? Yes, you can make your italicized content more attractive with font style property. Just follow these steps:

• Step 1. Take your cursor to where you want to add the CSS font-style property.
• 2. Type your font style name like Times New Roman.
• Step 3. Add a colon symbol.
• Step 4. Now, type your italic tag. If the font family doesn’t have italics available, type oblique.

Let’s look at the example:

<p style = “font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;”>The scientific name of the mango is <i>Mangifera</i>.</p>

Result:

Other Helpful Resources to Use HTML Italics

Bloggingtips have many other tutorials that can help you use HTML italics, such as:

• How to Create an HTML-Clickable Image: Digital stores must learn how to create an HTML-clickable image to drive traffic to their product pages.
• How to Create Jump-To Links: Let’s see how to create jump-to links to organize your blog posts better.
• How to Get DIV Positioning Right: You can learn how to get DIV positioning right to structure your web pages.

Parting Remarks

Italics is a simple yet powerful text format to make your content readable on the web.

Most CMS lets you italicize your text with a button press.

However, HTML has also made it easy to italicize content using the italic tag.

This guide has walked you through the whole HTML italics process.

We hope you can now italics content on your CMS platform using HTML.

But if you need help, you can comment below or refer to our other HTML cheat sheet articles.