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Changing the Appearance of your Timeline

For more technically capable creators, you can override or extend TimelineJS's CSS to have more control over how your timeline looks. To do this, you must be able to create CSS files and host them at a URL where TimelineJS can find them.

Fonts and Typography

For simple typographic styling, such as bold or italic text, you can use basic HTML tags in the headline, text, media credit, and media caption fields. You can also use tags which support the style attribute, such as <p>, <span>, and <div>. More complete documentation of HTML usage is beyond the scope of this document, but the web is full of tutorials. (Note that in limited cases, TimelineJS may strip some HTML markup that could be a potential security problem.)

The easiest way to change the fonts TimelineJS uses is to select from one of the list in the "Optional settings" section of step 3 of the Timeline authoring tool. However, if none of those font combinations work for you, you can create your own.

To create your own, you can download a model copy of a typical font CSS file from our CDN. You may want to put it through a CSS formatter before you start to edit it. If you are familiar with LESS, you may prefer to work from our LESS files on GitHub. If you set up Timeline as an `npm` project, then after you edit those files, you can run npm run dist to compile the LESS into CSS. You'll find your generated font CSS file in the dist/css/fonts directory.

Whether you use npm or simply edit a copy of one of the provided font CSS files, it's up to you to put this file on a web server. If you're using the embed code to publish your timeline, then you should change the src attribute of your iframe so that it has a parameter font with the URL to your font CSS as the value. This URL demonstrates setting the font with a URL, albeit in this case a URL to one of our provided font sets.

If, instead of the embed, you are directly instantiating the timeline in your page using JavaScript, see this documentation for more details.

Other CSS presentation

TimelineJS uses the Less CSS pre-processor to manage the complex number of elements, variables, and conditions needed to make everything look great. One side effect of how we use Less is that various style rules for TimelineJS are often very specific. Since, in CSS, more specific rules take precedence over less specific ones, you may find it easier to edit Timeline's Less files and compile your own stylesheet than to work out the exact selector which controls style rules.

If you want to change more than just typography, the basics are similar. You can create a Timeline CSS file by editing a copy of the main CSS file, or by checking out TimelineJS from GitHub and using npm to set up the development environment, and then editing the LESS files TimelineJS uses. If you are instantiating the timeline using JavaScript, you may also be able to selectively override CSS with <style> tags in the page.

Assuming you've created your own CSS file and put it on a web server somewhere, if you are using iframe embeds, you can edit the src of your embed to tell TimelineJS to load your CSS. Add a parameter called theme and set its value to the URL for your custom CSS. (At one point we considered providing alternative themes with TimelineJS, but we haven't made the time to fully complete and test any.)

See below for more details on various CSS classes which TimelineJS uses.