How does compiler determine the size of a bitfield struct?

Question 1

The standard (9.6 of the working draft) says this:

specifies a bit-field; its length is set off from the bit-field name by a colon. The bit-field attribute is not part of the type of the class member. The constant-expression shall be an integral constant-expression with a value greater than or equal to zero. The constant-expression may be larger than the number of bits in the object representation ( 3.9 ) of the bit-field’s type; in such cases the extra bits are used as padding bits and do not participate in the value representation ( 3.9 ) of the bit-field. Allocation of bit-fields within a class object is implementation-defined. Alignment of bit-fields is implementation-defined. Bit-fields are packed into some addressable allocation unit. [ Note: bit-fields straddle allocation units on some machines and not on others. Bit-fields are assigned right-to-left on some machines, left-to-right on others. —end note]

(my emphasis)

So it will depend on your compiler. What appears to be happening in your case - and I would describe as fairly normal behaviour - is that it is only combining bitfields of the same type and then is packing the structure to a 4 byte boundary, so in the first case we have:

struct a {
    uint32_t    foreColor_ : 32; // 4 bytes (total)
    uint32_t    backColor_ : 32; // 8 bytes
    uint16_t    lfHeight_ : 16;  // 10 bytes
    uint16_t    flags_: 4;       // 12 bytes
    bool    lfBold_: 1;          // 13 bytes
    bool    lfItalic_: 1;
    bool    lfUnderLine_: 1;
    bool    lfDashLine_: 1; 
    bool    lfStrike_: 1;
    bool    lfSubscript_: 1;
    bool    lfSuperscript_: 1;   // still 13 bytes
};

Which is then padded to 16 bytes, and in the second we have:

struct a {
    uint32_t    foreColor_ : 32;  // 4 bytes (total)
    uint32_t    backColor_ : 32;  // 8 bytes
    uint16_t    lfHeight_ : 16;   // 10 bytes
    uint8_t     flags_: 4;        // 11 bytes
    bool    lfBold_: 1;           // 12 bytes
    bool    lfItalic_: 1;
    bool    lfUnderLine_: 1;
    bool    lfDashLine_: 1; 
    bool    lfStrike_: 1;
    bool    lfSubscript_: 1;
    bool    lfSuperscript_: 1;    // still 12 bytes
};

Which needs no padding and stays at 12 bytes.

Question 2

It is compiler specific, the compiler is doing various alignments to optimize access to the fields.

If you want (need to) rely on the alignement. (like network header processing) You need to use #pragma push, pop.

Or __ attribute __(packed) - which is a GCC extension.

struct {
...
} __attribute__(packed)

This will force the compiler to squash it.