Why can't I decrease the line-height of this text?

http://jsfiddle.net/mJxn4/

This is very odd: I have a few lines of text wrapped in an <em> tag. No matter what I do, lowering the value for line-height below 17px has no effect. I can bump the line-height up to greater than 17px and it'll apply, but I can't get it lower than 17px.

The CSS in question is:

#others .item em {
    font-size: 13px;
    line-height: 17px;
}

Try adjusting the line height both higher and lower and run the updated fiddle after each change, and you'll see what I mean.

Why would this be? No line-height is specified anywhere else in the CSS, so nothing is overriding it. That couldn't be the case anyway because I'm adjusting the line-height up and down within the same selector, so it doesn't make sense that a higher value would apply, but a lower value would get overridden.

Because the em tag is inline and its line-height cannot be lower than its parent div.

For example, if you set the line-height of the parent to 10px, then you would be able to decrease the line-height of em tag to 10px as well.

In order for line-height property to work, div should has display property equal to block

.app-button-label{
    line-height: 20px;
    display: block;
 }

I was facing this problem with divs in mobile view - the line height was way too big and line-height wasn't working! I managed to make it work by adding "display:block", per advice here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7424867/why-isnt-the-css-property-line-height-not-letting-me-make-really-tight-line-s

Hope this helps anyone else facing the same problem in future

You seem to be using normalized css option in jsfiddle - which equates to the CSS rules being reset - ala http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

You can either reset the reset, or use a different reset if you really need it.

See here for more details:

http://sixrevisions.com/css/a-comprehensive-guide-to-css-resets/

The best way to do it is using css reset.

Write your own or use popular one like

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

The simplest way is to specify the line height with a higher priority, for example you could write: line-height: 14px !important;

If it is still not working set high priority in both where you u would like to decrease the line height (inline css) and also put in the body css .. remember the high priority (!important;) because it overrides any other unknown css rules.

Hope this helps

Ahmed