CSS text-wrap Property: pretty and balance Explained

The text-wrap property in CSS offers a powerful way to control how text is wrapped within its container. While traditional text wrapping is based on basic rules, newer values like pretty and balance provide enhanced options for achieving visually appealing text layouts. This post will explore how these values work and when to use them.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.” — Robert Bringhurst

What is the Text-Wrap Property?

The text-wrap property is part of the CSS Text Module and is designed to handle text wrapping strategies. By default, text wraps according to the browser’s standard behavior. However, with text-wrap, developers can exert finer control over how text fits within its container.

Basic Syntax

element {
  text-wrap: value;
}

CSS text-wrap Values

Here are the applicable values for the text-wrap property:

• normal: The default behavior where text wraps naturally within the container.
• pretty: Optimizes text wrapping for aesthetic appeal, improving line breaks to enhance readability.
• balance: Balances the length of lines, ensuring lines within a block have a more consistent width.

Diving Into Pretty and Balance Values

Both pretty and balance are designed to address specific challenges in text layout, enhancing readability and the overall visual experience. While pretty focuses on aesthetic line breaks, balance works towards maintaining uniformity in line lengths.

Understanding the distinctions between these values will help you choose the right one for your design needs.

Pretty

The pretty value focuses on improving the appearance of text by adjusting line breaks for better aesthetics. It not only minimizes orphan words but also makes additional refinements to improve the flow and readability of text.

For example, pretty adjusts hyphenation if consecutive hyphenated lines appear at the end of a paragraph. It can also make subtle adjustments to previous lines to create space for better wrapping.

Additionally, when text justification is applied, pretty ensures that the adjustments for alignment don’t lead to awkward breaks or spacing issues. This makes it an excellent choice for achieving more polished and professional typography.

While its current focus is primarily on improving line breaks and handling orphans, future updates to text-wrap: pretty may introduce more advanced text-breaking optimizations.

p {
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

Using pretty ensures that line breaks enhance the reading experience while handling hyphenation and justification seamlessly.

Balance

On the other hand, balance ensures that the lines of text within a block are of similar length. This helps avoid scenarios where one line is significantly shorter than the others, which can disrupt the visual flow.

div {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

This value is particularly beneficial when designing responsive layouts, as it maintains consistent line lengths across various screen sizes.

See the Pen
Animated comparison of balanced and unbalanced headlines by Roee Yossef (@roeey)
on CodePen.

Practical Examples

Let’s explore a practical use case where both pretty and balance can be applied. Imagine a Hero Section on your website with an unevenly wrapped title.

Applying text-wrap: balance to the headline will ensure that the lines are evenly distributed, creating a more consistent appearance. This guarantees a balanced layout regardless of the text content in the headline.

In the following example, notice how an orphan word appears at the end of the subtitle:

Using text-wrap: pretty will resolve the issue regardless of screen width. It consistently ensures that no orphan words remain, which is a remarkable improvement.

In this example, the balanced wrapping ensures consistent line lengths, reducing the likelihood of orphan words appearing at the end of a block.

Browser Support

As of now, text-wrap and its advanced values are experimental features. Check the latest browser compatibility tables to ensure support for your target audience.

Performance Considerations

While the text-wrap property can greatly enhance the visual appeal of your content, it’s important to consider its impact on performance:

• • Rendering Overhead: Advanced text wrapping algorithms like pretty and balance require more computational resources compared to the default normal value. This could lead to longer rendering times, particularly on large blocks of text.
  • Impact on Low-End Devices: On devices with limited processing power, using pretty or balance may result in slower performance, affecting the user experience.
  • Responsiveness: When combined with responsive designs, these values can sometimes cause layout shifts as the browser recalculates line breaks. This could lead to a slight delay in rendering fully responsive text blocks.

It’s essential to test these values thoroughly, especially on resource-constrained devices, to ensure optimal performance and user experience.

To mitigate performance issues:

• Use text-wrap selectively, applying it only to key text elements where visual balance is crucial.
• Test your site on a range of devices and screen sizes to identify any potential performance bottlenecks.
• Consider fallback options for older browsers or low-powered devices by setting normal as the default and progressively enhancing with pretty or balance.

Conclusion

The text-wrap property, especially with values like pretty and balance, provides powerful tools for improving text presentation in web design. By leveraging these values, developers can create layouts that not only look better but also enhance readability and user experience.

These values also play a critical role in solving common typography issues, such as orphan words, ensuring your text remains visually harmonious. However, be mindful of performance implications, and ensure thorough testing to deliver a seamless experience across all devices.

“Typography goes beyond just font selection; it involves structuring content for optimal readability and aesthetics. Learn more about this in our detailed guide on The Role of Typographic Hierarchy and Fonts in Effective Web Design.”

For more insights into CSS properties, stay tuned to our blog and explore our CSS category for more articles.