Specify width in *characters*

Question

When using a fixed width font, I\'d like to specify the width of an HTML element in characters.

The \"em\" unit is supposed to be the width

Answer 1

ch unit

The unit you're looking for is ch. According to the MDN docs:

ch: Represents the width, or more precisely the advance measure, of the glyph "0" (zero, the Unicode character U+0030) in the element's font.

It is supported in current versions of major browsers (caniuse).

Example

pre {
    width: 80ch; /* classic terminal width for code sections */
}