Targeting specific characters with CSS rules via Syntax Highlighting
September 2025
Terence Eden1 made a post about Targeting specific characters with CSS rules2. I love working with arbitrary constraints3 and it got me thinking. How would I do it?
The first thing that came to mind was syntax highlighting, but for letters. That is, wrap every letter in a span so you can target them with CSS.
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Endnotes
Terence mentions the approach of wrapping everything in markup, but went with a more interesting idea in the post: Using unicode to apply different fonts directly to different characters without. Very cool idea.
Reminds me of the time I set up a custom font to replace this with a single character glyph for coding.
Footnotes
New discovery that's an easy add to the ol' RSS feed reader.
The source that got me thinking about about this.