Skip to main content

Slice Your Text Cleanly with These CSS Hacks



Text overflows ruin your clean design. Too much content spills out, cluttering your layout.

It’s messy, unprofessional, and buries my design’s vibe. But there’s a way to tame it with clean CSS tricks.

Quick Fix: Single-Line Truncation

A single line of CSS can clip text cleanly. This is my go-to for tight headers or captions.
Here’s the code to make it happen:

.single-line-truncate {
  width: 300px; /* Fixed width for the example */
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
<div class="single-line-truncate">
  Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
</div>

It slices text neatly with dots. It keeps text from wrapping or overflowing. It only works for single lines, leaving multi-line text messy.

Next Level: Line-Clamp for Multi-Line

When I need multi-line control, this WebKit trick shines. WebKit’s line-clamp property handles multi-line text elegantly.

Here’s how to level up:

.multi-line-truncate {
  width: 300px; /* Fixed width for the example */
  display: -webkit-box;
  -webkit-line-clamp: 3;
  -webkit-box-orient: vertical;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
<div class="multi-line-truncate">
  Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
  Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
</div>

The -webkit-line-clamp property caps text at a set line count.
Catch: It’s WebKit-only, so test older browsers (you got this, right? 😄).

Backup for Browsers Lacking WebKit Support

When browsers don’t handle WebKit properties, use max-height to mimic truncation. Here’s the setup:

.fallback-truncate {
  width: 300px; /* Fixed width for the example */
  max-height: 4.5em; /* 3 lines * 1.5em (line height) */
  line-height: 1.5em;
  overflow: hidden;
}
<div class="fallback-truncate">
  Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
  Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
</div>

Max-height limits text to a set number of lines by multiplying line-height by the desired line count. The ellipsis won’t appear, but the text cuts off cleanly.

Final Takeaway

Play with these for a crisp user experience. Pair these methods for a solid multi-line truncation fix across various browsers and layouts.

Follow for more cool CSS hacks.

Thank you for being a part of the community


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CSS only Click-handlers You Might not be using, but you should

  You’re building a simple website, a good-looking landing page with a “See More” button. Instinctively, you reach for JavaScript to handle the button click event. But wait — what if I told you that CSS alone could do the job? Yes. CSS is often underestimated, but it can handle click interactions without JavaScript. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create CSS-only click handlers using the :target pseudo-class, and explore scenarios where this approach makes perfect sense. The :target Pseudo-Class CSS offers several pseudo-classes that let you style elements based on different states ( :hover , :focus , :checked ). But there’s one you might not have used before —  :target . The :target pseudo-class applies styles to an element when its ID matches the fragment identifier in the URL (the part after # ). This behavior is commonly seen when clicking an anchor link that jumps to a section on the same page. Here’s a simple example : <a href="#contact">Go to Contact</...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sharpen Your Front-End Skills: Quick HTML, CSS & React Interview Challenges

  The source of this image is Chat GPT based on writing! Are you preparing for front-end developer interviews and looking for practical, hands-on ways to improve your HTML, CSS, and React skills? Whether you’re a beginner aiming to build confidence or an experienced developer brushing up on UI skills, small, targeted challenges can make a huge difference. In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the best free and low-cost resources that offer real-world front-end tasks — perfect for interview prep, portfolio building, and daily practice. 1. Frontend Mentor frontendmentor.io Frontend Mentor is one of the most popular platforms for hands-on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript challenges. You get beautifully designed templates (in Figma or image formats) and are asked to bring them to life using clean code. The platform offers difficulty levels ranging from newbie to expert, and it’s perfect for practicing responsiveness and semantic HTML. Bonus : You can even filter for React-based ...
Post a Comment
Read more

6 Essential JavaScript Concepts Every Developer Should Understand

It’s the only language I’ve used where [] == ![] it's true and where you can, typeof null and somehow get 'object' . But despite all its quirks (and there are many), there are a few core concepts that make life with JS not just easier, but saner. This isn’t some computer science flex. These are practical concepts that, once you understand them, make you write better, cleaner, and less buggy code. 1. Hoisting  Before you rage at your variables being undefined , understand this: JS hoists variable and function declarations to the top of their scope. But —  and this is important  —  only the declarations , not the assignments. Why? Because JS reads it like: This is also why let and const behave differently — they’re hoisted too, but live in the “Temporal Dead Zone” until declared. 2. Closures Closures are like little memory vaults for your functions. They allow functions to remember variables from the scope they were created in, even after that scope has gone. Why care? T...
Post a Comment
Read more