Transparent text cut out of background

It's possible with css3 but it's not supported in all browsers

With background-clip: text; you can use a background for the text, but you will have to align it with the background of the page

body {
    background: url(http://www.color-hex.com/palettes/26323.png) repeat;
    margin:10px;
}
h1 { 
    background-color:#fff;
    overflow:hidden;
    display:inline-block; 
    padding:10px; 
    font-weight:bold;
    font-family:arial;
    color:transparent;
    font-size:200px;
}
span { 
    background: url(http://www.color-hex.com/palettes/26323.png) -20px -20px repeat;
    -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
    -webkit-background-clip: text;
    display:block;
}
<h1><span>ABCDEFGHIKJ</span></h1>

http://jsfiddle.net/JGPuZ/1337/

Automatic Alignment

With a little javascript you can align the background automatically:

$(document).ready(function(){
  //Position of the header in the webpage
  var position = $("h1").position();
  var padding = 10; //Padding set to the header
  var left = position.left + padding;
  var top = position.top + padding;
  $("h1").find("span").css("background-position","-"+left+"px -"+top+"px"); 
});
body {
    background: url(http://www.color-hex.com/palettes/26323.png) repeat;
    margin:10px;
}
h1 { 
    background-color:#fff;
    overflow:hidden;
    display:inline-block; 
    padding:10px; 
    font-weight:bold;
    font-family:arial;
    color:transparent;
    font-size:200px;
}
span { 
    background: url(http://www.color-hex.com/palettes/26323.png) -20px -20px repeat;
    -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
    -webkit-background-clip: text;
    display:block;
}
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<h1><span>ABCDEFGHIKJ</span></h1>
​

http://jsfiddle.net/JGPuZ/1336/


There is a simple way to do this with just CSS:

background: black;
color: white;
mix-blend-mode: multiply;

for transparent text on a black background, or

background: white;
color: black;
mix-blend-mode: screen;

for transparent text on a white background.

Put these styles on your text element with whichever background you want behind it.

Example CodePen example screenshot

Read up on mix-blend-mode and experiment with it to use different colours.

Caveats:

  1. For this to work in chrome, you also need to explicitly set a background colour on the html element.
  2. This works on basically all modern browsers except IE.

Although this is possible with CSS, a better approach would be to use an inline SVG with SVG masking. This approach has some advantages over CSS :

  • Much better browser support: IE10+, chrome, Firefox, safari...
  • This doesn't impact SEO as spiders can crawl SVG content (google indexes SVG content since 2010)

CodePen Demo : SVG text mask

transparent text clipping background

body,html{height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;}
body{
  background:url('https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8760/17195790401_94fcf60556_c.jpg');
  background-size:cover;
  background-attachment:fixed;
}
svg{width:100%;}
<svg viewbox="0 0 100 60">
  <defs>
    <mask id="mask" x="0" y="0" width="100" height="50">
      <rect x="0" y="0" width="100" height="40" fill="#fff"/>
      <text text-anchor="middle" x="50" y="18" dy="1">SVG</text>
      <text text-anchor="middle" x="50" y="30" dy="1">Text mask</text>
    </mask>
  </defs>
  <rect x="5" y="5" width="90" height="30" mask="url(#mask)" fill-opacity="0.5"/>    
</svg>

If you aim on making the text selectable and searchable, you need to include it outside the <defs> tag. The following example shows a way to do that keeping the transparent text with the <use> tag:

body,html{height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;}
body{
  background:url('https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8760/17195790401_94fcf60556_c.jpg');
  background-size:cover;
  background-attachment:fixed;
}
svg{width:100%;}
<svg viewbox="0 0 100 60">
  <defs>
    <g id="text">
      <text text-anchor="middle" x="50" y="18" dy="1">SVG</text>
      <text text-anchor="middle" x="50" y="30" dy="1">Text mask</text>
    </g>
    <mask id="mask" x="0" y="0" width="100" height="50">
      <rect x="0" y="0" width="100" height="40" fill="#fff"/>
      <use xlink:href="#text" />
    </mask>
  </defs>
  <rect x="5" y="5" width="90" height="30" mask="url(#mask)" fill-opacity="0.5"/>
  <use xlink:href="#text" mask="url(#mask)" />
</svg>

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