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Technology

Automating Repetitive Tasks: Productivity Hacks for Developers

By Atharva Joshi, Published on 2024-05-08T18:30:00.000Z

How to deploy your Next.js apps on Vercel.

Until now, trying to style an article, document, or blog post with Tailwind has been a tedious task that required a keen eye for typography and a lot of complex custom CSS.

By default, Tailwind removes all of the default browser styling from paragraphs, headings, lists and more. This ends up being really useful for building application UIs because you spend less time undoing user-agent styles, but when you really are just trying to style some content that came from a rich-text editor in a CMS or a markdown file, it can be surprising and unintuitive.

We get lots of complaints about it actually, with people regularly asking us things like:

> Why is Tailwind removing the default styles on my h1 elements? How do I disable this? What do you mean I lose all the other base styles too?

> We hear you, but we're not convinced that simply disabling our base styles is what you really want. You don't want to have to remove annoying margins every time you use a p element in a piece of your dashboard UI. And I doubt you really want your blog posts to use the user-agent styles either — you want them to look awesome, not awful.

The @tailwindcss/typography plugin is our attempt to give you what you actually want, without any of the downsides of doing something stupid like disabling our base styles.

It adds a new prose class that you can slap on any block of vanilla HTML content and turn it into a beautiful, well-formatted document:

<article className="prose">

<h1>Garlic bread with cheese: What the science tells us</h1>

<p>

For years parents have espoused the health benefits of eating garlic bread

with cheese to their children, with the food earning such an iconic status

in our culture that kids will often dress up as warm, cheesy loaf for

Halloween.

</p>

<p>

But a recent study shows that the celebrated appetizer may be linked to a

series of rabies cases springing up around the country.

</p>

</article>

—>

## What to expect from here on out

What follows from here is just a bunch of absolute nonsense I've written to dogfood the plugin itself. It includes every sensible typographic element I could think of, like bold text, unordered lists, ordered lists, code blocks, block quotes, and even italics.

It's important to cover all of these use cases for a few reasons:

1. We want everything to look good out of the box.

2. Really just the first reason, that's the whole point of the plugin.

3. Here's a third pretend reason though a list with three items looks more realistic than a list with two items.

Now we're going to try out another header style.

Something a wise person once told me about typography is:

> Typography is pretty important if you don't want your stuff to look like trash. Make it good then it won't be bad.

It's probably important that images look okay here by default as well:

<Image

src="/blogs/c-d-x-PDX_a_82obo-unsplash.jpg"

width="718"

height="404"

alt="Image"

sizes="100vw"

/>