Is it possible to apply CSS to half of a character?

Question

What I am looking for:

A way to style one HALF of a character. (In this case, half the letter being transparent)

Wh

Answer 1

FWIW, here's my take on this doing it only with CSS: http://codepen.io/ricardozea/pen/uFbts/

Several notes:

• The main reason I did this was to test myself and see if I was able to accomplish styling half of a character while actually providing a meaningful answer to the OP.

• I am aware that this is not an ideal or the most scalable solution and the solutions proposed by the people here are far better for "real world" scenarios.

• The CSS code I created is based on the first thoughts that came to my mind and my own personal approach to the problem.

• My solution only works on symmetrical characters, like X, A, O, M. **It does not work on asymmetric characters like B, C, F, K or lower case letters.

• ** HOWEVER, this approach creates very interesting 'shapes' with asymmetric characters. Try changing the X to a K or to a lower case letter like an h or a p in the CSS :)

HTML

SCSS

.half-character { 
  display: inline-block;
  font: bold 350px/.8 Arial;
  position: relative;

  &:before, &:after {
    content: 'X'; //Change character here
    display: inline-block;
    width: 50%;
    overflow: hidden;
    color: #7db9e8;
  }
  &:after {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 50%;
    color: #1e5799;
    transform: rotateY(-180deg);
  }
}