Css break all or break word

The definitions alone of word-break and word-wrap can easily make your head spin, but when comparing these two, specifically, it’s much easier to think of them like this:

First of all, you would probably like to use overflow: auto; as well, and you might want to try what using that alone looks like: if you can tolerate needing to scroll the text in the container rather than having arbitrary wrap positions, it might be just what you need.

Then keep in mind that in this context, a «word» is a string with no whitespaces in it.

word-break: break-all;

Prioritizes minimizing the space wasted while avoiding overflow, before keeping any words unbroken, so it never wraps anywhere but at the right margin. It even replaces line breaks with spaces in the contained text. This is useful if you want to avoid scrolling as much as possible and use a container that is enough wide for readability: however if your container is too narrow the result is in general not very satisfying, as Drkawashima noted.

word-wrap/overflow-wrap: break-word;

Prioritizes keeping any and all words unbroken while avoiding overflow, so if a word is too long to fit on the rest of the line, it wraps first and tries to fit the rest of the text on the next line even if it means leaving the line above as short as only one single character. This is useful if you want maximum readability while avoiding scrolling as much as possible and use a container that is enough wide: otherwise you might want to use only overflow: auto instead.

Regarding word-wrap, it isn’t really replaced (and maybe also more universally recognized than overflow-wrap by the browsers in use worldwide): it became an alias for overflow-wrap because all the big browsers and many many webpages had already adopted word-wrap although originally not being defined in the standards.

However, because of the widespread use, it wasn’t discarded when overflow-wrap was defined, but rather defined as the alias it is today, and for legacy reasons, UAs (User-Agents, e.g., web browsers) must treat word-wrap as a legacy name alias of the overflow-wrap property. So it has become a de facto standard of W3C and it isn’t going away any day soon (perhaps when the W3C standard becomes extinct or the entire web is universally updated by bots with AI).

5.5. Overflow Wrapping: the overflow-wrap/word-wrap property

overflow-wrap (MDN)

1. Introduction

This module describes the typesetting controls of CSS;
that is, the features of CSS that control the translation of
source text to formatted, line-wrapped text.
Various CSS properties provide control over case transformation, white space collapsing, text wrapping, line breaking rules and hyphenation, alignment and justification, spacing,
and indentation.

Further information about the typesetting requirements
of various languages and writing systems around the world
can be found in the Internationalization Working Group’s Language Enablement Index. [TYPOGRAPHY]

1.1. Module Interactions

This module, together with the CSS Text Decoration Module,
replaces and extends the text-level features defined in Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 chapter 16. [CSS-TEXT-DECOR-3] [CSS2]

In addition to the terms defined below,
other terminology and concepts used in this specification are defined
in Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 and the CSS Writing Modes Module. [CSS2] and [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4].

1.2. Value Definitions

This specification follows the CSS property definition conventions from [CSS2] using the value definition syntax from [CSS-VALUES-3].
Value types not defined in this specification are defined in CSS Values & Units [CSS-VALUES-3].
Combination with other CSS modules may expand the definitions of these value types.

In addition to the property-specific values listed in their definitions,
all properties defined in this specification
also accept the CSS-wide keywords as their property value.
For readability they have not been repeated explicitly.

1.3. Languages and Typesetting

Authors should accurately language-tag their content
for the best typographic behavior.

Many typographic effects vary by linguistic context.
Language and writing system conventions can affect
line breaking, hyphenation, justification, glyph selection,
and many other typographic effects. In CSS, language-specific typographic tailorings
are only applied when the content language is known (declared). Therefore,
higher quality typography requires authors to communicate to the UA
the correct linguistic context of the text in the document.

The content language of an element is the (human) language
the element is declared to be in, according to the rules of the document language.
Note that it is possible for the content language of an element
to be unknown—e.g. untagged content,
or content in a document language that does not have a language-tagging facility,
is considered to have an unknown content language.

Note: Authors can declare the content language using the global lang attribute in HTML
or the universal xml:lang attribute in XML.
See the rules for determining the content language of an HTML element in HTML,
and the rules for determining the content language of an XML element in XML 1.0. [HTML] [XML10]

The content language an element is declared to be in
also identifies the specific written form of that language used in that element,
known as the content writing system.
Depending on the document language’s facilities for identifying the content language,
this information can be explicit or implied.
See the normative Appendix F:
Identifying the Content Writing System.

Note: Some languages have more than one writing system tradition;
in other cases a language can be transliterated into a foreign writing system.
Authors should subtag such cases
so that the UA can adapt appropriately.

1.4. Characters and Letters

The basic unit of typesetting is the character.
However, because writing systems are not always as simple as the basic English alphabet,
what a character actually is depends on the context in which the term is used.
For example, in Hangul (the Korean writing system),
each square representation of a syllable
(e.g. 한=Han)
can be considered a character.
However, the square symbol is really composed of multiple letters each representing a phoneme
(e.g. ㅎ=h, ㅏ=a, ㄴ=n)
and these also could each be considered a character.

A basic unit of computer text encoding, for any given encoding,
is also called a character,
and depending on the encoding,
a single encoding character might correspond
to the entire pre-composed syllabic character (e.g. 한),
to the individual phonemic character (e.g. ㅎ),
or to smaller units such as
a base letterform (e.g. ㅇ)
and any combining marks that vary it (e.g. extra strokes that represent aspiration).

In turn, a single encoding character can be represented in the data stream as one or more bytes;
and in programming environments one byte is sometimes also called a character.

Therefore the term character is fairly ambiguous where technical precision is required.

For text layout, we will refer to the typographic character unit as the basic unit of text.
Even within the realm of text layout,
the relevant character unit depends on the operation.
For example, line-breaking and letter-spacing will segment
a sequence of Thai characters that include U+0E33  ำ THAI CHARACTER SARA AM differently;
or the behavior of a conjunct consonant in a script such as Devanagari
may depend on the font in use.
So the typographic character represents a unit of the writing system—such as a Latin alphabetic letter (including its diacritics),
Hangul syllable,
Chinese ideographic character,
Myanmar syllable cluster—that is indivisible with respect to a particular typographic operation
(line-breaking, first-letter effects, tracking, justification, vertical arrangement, etc.).

Unicode Standard Annex #29: Text Segmentation defines a unit called the grapheme cluster which approximates the typographic character. [UAX29] A UA must use the extended grapheme cluster (not legacy grapheme cluster), as defined in UAX29,
as the basis for its typographic character unit.
However, the UA should tailor the definitions
as required by typographic tradition
since the default rules are not always appropriate or ideal—and is expected to tailor them differently
depending on the operation as needed.

Note: The rules for such tailorings are out of scope for CSS.

A typographic letter unit (or letter for the purpose of this specification)
is a typographic character unit belonging to one of the Letter or Number general categories.
See Appendix E:
Characters and Properties for how to determine the Unicode properties of a typographic character unit.

The rendering characteristics of a typographic character unit divided
by an element boundary is undefined.
Ideally each component should be rendered
according to the formatting requirements of its respective element’s properties
while maintaining correct shaping and positioning
of the typographic character unit as a whole.
However, depending on the nature of the formatting differences between its parts
and the capabilities of the font technology in use,
this is not always possible.
Therefore such a typographic character unit may be rendered as belonging to either side of the boundary,
or as some approximation of belonging to both.
Authors are forewarned that dividing grapheme clusters or ligatures
by element boundaries may give inconsistent or undesired results.

1.5. Text Processing

CSS is built on Unicode. [UNICODE] UAs that support Unicode must adhere to all normative requirements
of the Unicode Core Standard,
except where explicitly overridden by CSS.
UAs implemented on the basis of a non-Unicode text encoding model are still
expected to fulfill the same text handling requirements
by assuming an appropriate mapping and analogous behavior.

For the purpose of determining adjacency for text processing
(such as white space processing, text transformation, line-breaking, etc.),
and thus in general within this specification,
intervening inline box boundaries and out-of-flow elements
must be ignored.
With respect to text shaping, however, see § 7.3 Shaping Across Element Boundaries.

2. Transforming Text

2.1. Case Transforms: the text-transform property

This property transforms text for styling purposes.
It has no effect on the underlying content,
and must not affect the content of a plain text copy & paste operation.

Authors must not rely on text-transform for semantic purposes;
rather the correct casing and semantics should be encoded
in the source document text and markup.

Values have the following meanings:

none

No effects.

capitalize

Puts the first typographic letter unit of each word, if lowercase, in titlecase;
other characters are unaffected.

uppercase

Puts all letters in uppercase.

lowercase

Puts all letters in lowercase.

full-width

Puts all typographic character units in full-width form.
If a character does not have a corresponding full-width form,
it is left as is.
This value is typically used to typeset Latin letters and digits
as if they were ideographic characters.

full-size-kana

Converts all small Kana characters to the equivalent full-size Kana.
This value is typically used for ruby annotation text,
where authors may want all small Kana to be drawn as large Kana
to compensate for legibility issues at the small font sizes typically used in ruby.

abbr:lang(ja) { text-transform: full-width; }

Note: The purpose of text-transform is
to allow for presentational casing transformations
without affecting the semantics of the document.
Note in particular that text-transform casing operations are lossy,
and can distort the meaning of a text.
While accessibility interfaces may wish to convey
the apparent casing of the rendered text to the user,
the transformed text cannot be relied on to accurately represent
the underlying meaning of the document.

section > p:first-of-type::first-line {
  text-transform: uppercase;
}

rt { font-size: 50%; text-transform: full-size-kana; }
:is(h1, h2, h3, h4) rt { text-transform: none; /* unset for large text*/ }

<ruby>十<rt>じゅう</ruby>

2.1.1. Mapping Rules

For capitalize, what constitutes a “word“ is UA-dependent; [UAX29] is suggested (but not required)
for determining such word boundaries.
Out-of-flow elements and inline element boundaries
must not introduce a text-transform word boundary
and must be ignored when determining such word boundaries.

Note: Authors cannot depend on capitalize to follow
language-specific titlecasing conventions
(such as skipping articles in English).

The UA must use the full case mappings for Unicode characters,
including any conditional casing rules,
as defined in the Default Case Algorithms section of The Unicode Standard. [UNICODE] If (and only if) the content language of the element is,
according to the rules of the document language,
known,
then any appropriate language-specific rules must be applied as well.
These minimally include,
but are not limited to,
the language-specific rules in Unicode’s SpecialCasing.txt.

For example, in Turkish there are two “i”s,
one with a dot—“İ” and “i”—and one without—“I” and “ı”.
Thus the usual case mappings between “I” and “i”
are replaced with a different set of mappings
to their respective dotless/dotted counterparts,
which do not exist in English.
This mapping must only take effect
if the content language is Turkish
written in its modern Latin-based writing system (or another Turkic language that uses Turkish casing rules);
in other languages,
the usual mapping of “I” and “i” is required.
This rule is thus conditionally defined in Unicode’s SpecialCasing.txt file.

The definition of full-width and half-width forms
can be found in Unicode Standard Annex #11: East Asian Width. [UAX11] The mapping to full-width form is defined
by taking code points with the <wide> or the <narrow> tag
in their Decomposition_Mapping in Unicode Standard Annex #44: Unicode Character Database. [UAX44] For the <narrow> tag,
the mapping is from the code point to the decomposition
(minus <narrow> tag),
and for the <wide> tag,
the mapping is from the decomposition
(minus the <wide> tag)
back to the original code point.

The mappings for small Kana to full-size Kana are defined in Appendix G:
Small Kana Mappings.

2.1.2. Order of Operations

When multiple values are specified
and therefore multiple transformations need to be applied,
they are applied in the following order:

1. capitalize, uppercase, and lowercase
2. full-width
3. full-size-kana

Text transformation happens after § 4.1.1 Phase I: Collapsing and Transformation but before § 4.1.2 Phase II: Trimming and Positioning.
This means that full-width only transforms
spaces (U+0020) to U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE within preserved white space.

Note: As defined in Appendix A:
Text Processing Order of Operations,
transforming text affects line-breaking and other formatting operations.

3. White Space and Wrapping: the white-space property

This property specifies two things:

• whether and how white space is collapsed
• whether lines may wrap at unforced soft wrap opportunities

Values have the following meanings,
which must be interpreted according to
the White Space Processing and Line Breaking rules:

normal

This value directs user agents to collapse sequences of white space into a single character
(or in some cases, no character).
Lines may wrap at allowed soft wrap opportunities,
as determined by the line-breaking rules in effect,
in order to minimize inline-axis overflow.

pre

This value prevents user agents from collapsing sequences of white space. Segment breaks such as line feeds
are preserved as forced line breaks.
Lines only break at forced line breaks;
content that does not fit within the block container overflows it.

nowrap

Like normal,
this value collapses white space;
but like pre, it does not allow wrapping.

pre-wrap

Like pre,
this value preserves white space;
but like normal,
it allows wrapping.

break-spaces

The behavior is identical to that of pre-wrap,
except that:

• Any sequence of preserved white space or other space separators always takes up space,
  including at the end of the line.
• A line breaking opportunity exists
  after every preserved white space character
  and after every other space separator (including between adjacent spaces).

Note: This value does not guarantee
that there will never be any overflow due to white space:
for example, if the line length is so short
that even a single white space character does not fit,
overflow is unavoidable.

pre-line

Like normal,
this value collapses consecutive white space characters and allows wrapping,
but it preserves segment breaks in the source as forced line breaks.

White space that was not removed or collapsed due to white space processing
is called preserved white space.

Note: In some cases, preserved white space and other space separators can hang when at the end of the line;
this can affect whether they are measured for intrinsic sizing.

The following informative table summarizes the behavior
of various white-space values:

See White Space Processing Rules for details on how white space collapses.

See Line Breaking for details on wrapping behavior.

4. White Space Processing & Control Characters

The source text of a document often contains formatting
that is not relevant to the final rendering:
for example, breaking the source into segments (lines) for ease of editing
or adding white space characters such as tabs and spaces to indent the source code.
CSS white space processing allows the author
to control interpretation of such formatting:
to preserve or collapse it away when rendering the document.
White space processing in CSS
(which is controlled with the white-space property)
interprets white space characters only for rendering:
it has no effect on the underlying document data.

Note: Depending on the document language,
segments can be separated by a particular newline sequence
(such as a line feed or CRLF pair),
or delimited by some other mechanism,
such as the SGML RECORD-START and RECORD-END tokens.

For CSS processing,
each document language–defined “segment break” or “newline sequence”—or if none are defined, each line feed (U+000A)—in the text is treated as a segment break,
which is then interpreted for rendering as specified by the white-space property.

In the case of HTML,
each newline sequence is normalized to a single line feed (U+000A)
for representation in the DOM,
so when an HTML document is represented as a DOM tree
each line feed (U+000A)
is treated as a segment break. [HTML] [DOM]

Note: In most common CSS implementations,
HTML does not get styled directly.
Instead, it is processed into a DOM tree,
which is then styled.
Unlike HTML,
the DOM does not give any particular meaning to carriage returns (U+000D),
so they are not treated as segment breaks.
If carriage returns (U+000D) are inserted into the DOM
by means other than HTML parsing,
they then get treated as defined below.

Note: A document parser might
not only normalize any segment breaks,
but also collapse other space characters or
otherwise process white space according to markup rules.
Because CSS processing occurs after the parsing stage,
it is not possible to restore these characters for styling.
Therefore, some of the behavior specified below
can be affected by these limitations and
may be user agent dependent.

Note: Anonymous blocks consisting entirely of collapsible white space are removed from the rendering tree.
Thus any such white space surrounding a block-level element is collapsed away.
See Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification § visuren#anonymous. [CSS2]

Control characters (Unicode category Cc)—other than tabs (U+0009),
line feeds (U+000A),
carriage returns (U+000D)
and sequences that form a segment break—must be rendered as a visible glyph
which the UA must synthesize if the glyphs found in the font are not visible,
and must be otherwise treated as any other character
of the Other Symbols (So) general category and Common script.
The UA may use a glyph provided by a font specifically for the control character,
substitute the glyphs provided for the corresponding symbol in the Control Pictures block,
generate a visual representation of its code point value,
or use some other method to provide an appropriate visible glyph.
As required by Unicode,
unsupported Default_ignorable characters
must be ignored for text rendering. [UNICODE]

Carriage returns (U+000D) are treated identically to spaces (U+0020) in all respects.

Note: For HTML documents,
carriage returns present in the source code
are converted to line feeds at the parsing stage
(see HTML § 13.2.3.5 Preprocessing the input stream and the definition of normalize newlines in Infra and therefore do no appear as U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN to CSS. [HTML] [INFRA])
However, the character is preserved—and the above rule observable—when encoded using an escape sequence ( ).

4.1. The White Space Processing Rules

Except where specified otherwise,
white space processing in CSS affects only
the document white space characters: spaces (U+0020), tabs (U+0009), and segment breaks.

Note: The set of characters considered document white space (part of the document content)
and those considered syntactic white space
(part of the CSS syntax)
are not necessarily identical.
However, since both include spaces (U+0020), tabs (U+0009), and line feeds (U+000A)
most authors won’t notice any differences.

Besides space (U+0020)
and no-break space (U+00A0),
Unicode defines a number of additional space separator characters. [UNICODE] In this specification
all characters in the Unicode general category Zs
except space (U+0020)
and no-break space (U+00A0)
are collectively referred to as other space separators.

4.1.1. Phase I: Collapsing and Transformation

For each inline
(including anonymous inlines;
see Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification § visuren#anonymous [CSS2])
within an inline formatting context, white space characters are processed as follows
prior to line breaking and bidi reordering,
ignoring bidi formatting characters (characters with the Bidi_Control property [UAX9])
as if they were not there:

• If white-space is set to normal, nowrap, or pre-line, white space characters are considered collapsible and are processed by performing the following steps:
  1. Any sequence of collapsible spaces and tabs immediately preceding or following a segment break is removed.
  2. Collapsible segment breaks are transformed for rendering
     according to the segment break transformation rules.
  3. Every collapsible tab is converted to a collapsible space (U+0020).
  4. Any collapsible space immediately following another collapsible space—even one outside the boundary of the inline containing that space,
     provided both spaces are within the same inline formatting context—is collapsed to have zero advance width.
     (It is invisible,
     but retains its soft wrap opportunity,
     if any.)
• If white-space is set to pre, pre-wrap, or break-spaces,
  any sequence of spaces is treated as a sequence of non-breaking spaces.
  However, for pre-wrap,
  a soft wrap opportunity exists at the end of a sequence of spaces and/or tabs,
  while for break-spaces,
  a soft wrap opportunity exists after every space and every tab.

<ltr>A <rtl> B </rtl> C</ltr>

A  BC

4.1.2. Phase II: Trimming and Positioning

Then, the entire block is rendered.
Inlines are laid out,
taking bidi reordering into account,
and wrapping as specified by the white-space property.
As each line is laid out,

1. A sequence of collapsible spaces at the beginning of a line
   is removed.
2. If the tab size is zero, preserved tabs are not rendered.
   Otherwise, each preserved tab is rendered
   as a horizontal shift that lines up
   the start edge of the next glyph with the next tab stop.
   If this distance is less than 0.5ch,
   then the subsequent tab stop is used instead. Tab stops occur at points
   that are multiples of the tab size from the starting content edge
   of the preserved tab’s nearest block container ancestor.
   The tab size is given by the tab-size property.

   Note: See the Unicode rules on how tabulation (U+0009) interacts with bidi. [UAX9]
3. A sequence of collapsible spaces at the end of a line is removed,
   as well as any trailing U+1680   OGHAM SPACE MARK
   whose white-space property is normal, nowrap, or pre-line.

   Note: Due to Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm rule L1,
   a sequence of collapsible spaces located at the end of the line
   prior to bidi reordering will also be at the end of the line after reordering. [UAX9] [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]

4. If there remains any sequence of white space, other space separators,
   and/or preserved tabs at the end of a line
   (after bidi reordering [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]):
   • If white-space is set to normal, nowrap,
     or pre-line,
     the UA must hang this sequence (unconditionally).
   • If white-space is set to pre-wrap,
     the UA must (unconditionally) hang this sequence,
     unless the sequence is followed by a forced line break,
     in which case it must conditionally hang the sequence instead.
     It may also visually collapse the character advance widths
     of any that would otherwise overflow.

     Note: Hanging the white space rather than collapsing it
     allows users to see the space when selecting or editing text.

   • If white-space is set to break-spaces, spaces, tabs, and other space separators are treated the same as other visible characters:
     they cannot hang nor have their advance width collapsed.

     Note: Such characters therefore take up space,
     and depending on the available space
     and applicable line breaking controls
     will either overflow or cause the line to wrap.

p {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  width: 5ch;
  border: solid 1px;
  font-family: monospace;
  text-align: center;
}

<p> 0 </p>

p {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  width: 3ch;
  border: solid 1px;
  font-family: monospace;
}

<p> 0 0 0 0 </p>

p {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  width: 3ch;
  border: solid 1px;
  font-family: monospace;
}

<p>0 0 0 0 </p>

4.1.3. Segment Break Transformation Rules

When white-space is pre, pre-wrap, break-spaces, or pre-line, segment breaks are not collapsible and are instead transformed into a preserved line feed (U+000A).

For other values of white-space, segment breaks are collapsible,
and are collapsed as follows:

1. First, any collapsible segment break immediately following another collapsible segment break is removed.
2. Then any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020)
   or removed
   depending on the context before and after the break.
   The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level.

   Note: The white space processing rules have already
   removed any tabs and spaces around the segment break before this context is evaluated.

Here is an English paragraph
that is broken into multiple lines
in the source code so that it can
be more easily read and edited
in a text editor.

這個段落是那麼長，
在一行寫不行。最好
用三行寫。

Note: Historically, HTML and CSS have unconditionally converted segment breaks to spaces,
which has prevented content authored in languages such as Chinese
from being able to break lines within the source.
Thus UA heuristics need to be conservative about where they discard segment breaks even as they strive to improve support for such languages.

4.2. Tab Character Size: the tab-size property

This property determines the tab size used to render preserved tab characters (U+0009).
A <number> represents the measure
as a multiple of the advance width of the space character (U+0020)
of the nearest block container ancestor of the preserved tab,
including its associated letter-spacing and word-spacing.
Negative values are not allowed.

5. Line Breaking and Word Boundaries

When inline-level content is laid out into lines, it is broken across line boxes.
Such a break is called a line break.
When a line is broken due to explicit line-breaking controls
(such as a preserved newline character),
or due to the start or end of a block,
it is a forced line break.
When a line is broken due to content wrapping (i.e. when the UA creates unforced line breaks
in order to fit the content within the measure),
it is a soft wrap break.
The process of breaking inline-level content into lines is called line breaking.

Wrapping is only performed at an allowed break point,
called a soft wrap opportunity.
When wrapping is enabled (see white-space),
the UA must minimize the amount of content overflowing a line
by wrapping the line at a soft wrap opportunity,
if one exists.

In most writing systems,
in the absence of hyphenation a soft wrap opportunity occurs only at word boundaries.
Many such systems use spaces or punctuation to explicitly separate words,
and soft wrap opportunities can be identified by these characters.
Scripts such as Thai, Lao, and Khmer, however,
do not use spaces or punctuation to separate words.
Although the zero width space (U+200B) can be used as an explicit word delimiter
in these scripts,
this practice is not common.
As a result, a lexical resource is needed
to correctly identify soft wrap opportunities in such texts.

In some other writing systems, soft wrap opportunities are based on orthographic syllable boundaries,
not word boundaries.
Some of these systems, such as Javanese and Balinese,
are similar to Thai and Lao in that they
require analysis of the text to find breaking opportunities.
In others such as Chinese (as well as Japanese, Yi, and sometimes also Korean),
each syllable tends to correspond to a single typographic letter unit,
and thus line breaking conventions allow the line to break
anywhere except between certain character combinations.
Additionally the level of strictness in these restrictions
varies with the typesetting style.

While CSS does not fully define where soft wrap opportunities occur,
some controls are provided to distinguish common variations:

• The line-break property allows choosing various levels of “strictness”
  for line breaking restrictions.
• The word-break property controls what types of letters
  are glommed together to form unbreakable “words”,
  causing CJK characters to behave like non-CJK text or vice versa.
• The hyphens property controls whether automatic hyphenation
  is allowed to break words in scripts that hyphenate.
• The overflow-wrap property allows the UA to take a break anywhere
  in otherwise-unbreakable strings that would otherwise overflow.

Note: Unicode Standard Annex #14: Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm defines a baseline behavior
for line breaking for all scripts in Unicode,
which is expected to be further tailored. [UAX14] More information on line breaking conventions
can be found in Requirements for Japanese Text Layout [JLREQ] and Formatting Rules for Japanese Documents [JIS4051] for Japanese, Requirements for Chinese Text Layout [CLREQ] and General Rules for Punctuation [ZHMARK] for Chinese.
See also the Internationalization Working Group’s Language Enablement Index which includes more information on additional languages. [TYPOGRAPHY] Any guidance on additional appropriate references
would be much appreciated.

5.1. Line Breaking Details

When determining line breaks:

• The interaction of line breaking and bidirectional text is defined by CSS Writing Modes 4 § 2.4 Applying the Bidirectional Reordering Algorithm and the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX9§3.4 Reordering Resolved Levels in particular). [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4] [UAX9]
• Preserved segment breaks, and—regardless of the white-space value—any Unicode character with the the BK and NL line breaking class,
  must be treated as forced line breaks. [UAX14]

  Note: The bidi implications of such forced line breaks are defined by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. [UAX9]
• Except where explicitly defined otherwise
  (e.g. for line-break: anywhere or overflow-wrap: anywhere)
  line breaking behavior defined for
  the WJ, ZW, GL,
  and ZWJ Unicode line breaking classes
  must be honored. [UAX14]
• UAs that allow wrapping at punctuation
  other than word separators in writing systems that use them should prioritize breakpoints.
  (For example, if breaks after slashes are given a lower priority than spaces,
  the sequence “check /etc” will never break between the «/» and the «e».)
  As long as care is taken to avoid such awkward breaks,
  allowing breaks at appropriate punctuation other than word separators is recommended,
  as it results in more even-looking margins, particularly in narrow measures.
  The UA may use the width of the containing block, the text’s language,
  the line-break value,
  and other factors in assigning priorities:
  CSS does not define prioritization of line breaking opportunities.
  Prioritization of word separators is not expected,
  however,
  if word-break: break-all is specified
  (since this value explicitly requests line breaking behavior
  not based on breaking at word separators)—and is forbidden under line-break: anywhere.
• Out-of-flow elements
  and inline element boundaries
  do not introduce a forced line break or soft wrap opportunity in the flow.
• For Web-compatibility
  there is a soft wrap opportunity before and after each replaced element or other atomic inline,
  even when adjacent to a character that would normally suppress them,
  such as U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE.
• For soft wrap opportunities created by characters
  that disappear at the line break (e.g. U+0020 SPACE),
  properties on the box directly containing that character
  control the line breaking at that opportunity.
  For soft wrap opportunities defined by the boundary between two characters,
  the white-space property
  on the nearest common ancestor of the two characters
  controls breaking;
  which elements’ line-break, word-break, and overflow-wrap properties
  control the determination of soft wrap opportunities at such boundaries
  is undefined in Level 3.
• For soft wrap opportunities before the first
  or after the last character of a box,
  the break occurs immediately before/after the box
  (at its margin edge)
  rather than breaking the box
  between its content edge and the content.
• Line breaking in/around Ruby is defined
  in CSS Ruby Annotation Layout 1 § 3.4 Breaking Across Lines. [CSS-RUBY-1]
• In order to avoid unexpected overflow,
  if the user agent is unable to perform the requisite lexical
  or orthographic analysis
  for line breaking any content language that requires it—for example due to lacking a dictionary for certain languages—it must assume a soft wrap opportunity between pairs of typographic letter units in that writing system.

  Note: This provision is not triggered merely when
  the UA fails to find a word boundary in a particular text run;
  the text run may well be a single unbreakable word.
  It applies for example
  when a text run is composed of Khmer characters (U+1780 to U+17FF)
  if the user agent does not know how to determine
  word boundaries in Khmer.

5.2. Breaking Rules for Letters: the word-break property

This property specifies soft wrap opportunities between letters,
i.e. where it is “normal” and permissible to break lines of text.
Specifically it controls whether a soft wrap opportunity generally exists
between adjacent typographic letter units,
treating non-letter typographic character units belonging to the NU, AL, AI,
or ID Unicode line breaking classes
as typographic letter units for this purpose (only). [UAX14] It does not affect rules governing the soft wrap opportunities created by white space (as well as by other space separators)
and around punctuation.
(See line-break for controls affecting punctuation and small kana.)

각 줄의 마지막에 한글이 올 때 줄 나눔 기
준을 “글자” 또는 “어절” 단위로 한다.

각 줄의 마지막에 한글이 올 때 줄 나눔
기준을 “글자” 또는 “어절” 단위로 한다.

ተወልዱ፡ኵሉ፡ሰብእ፡ግዑዛን፡ወዕሩያን፡
በማዕረግ፡ወብሕግ።ቦሙ፡ኅሊና፡ወዐቅል፡
ወይትጌበሩ፡አሐዱ፡ምስለ፡አሀዱ፡
በመንፈሰ፡እኍና።

ተወልዱ፡ኵሉ፡ሰብእ፡ግዑዛን፡ወዕሩያን፡በማ
ዕረግ፡ወብሕግ።ቦሙ፡ኅሊና፡ወዐቅል፡ወይትጌ
በሩ፡አሐዱ፡ምስለ፡አሀዱ፡በመንፈሰ፡እኍና።

Note: To enable additional break opportunities only in the case of overflow,
see overflow-wrap.

Values have the following meanings:

normal

Words break according to their customary rules,
as described above.
Korean, which commonly exhibits two different behaviors,
allows breaks between any two consecutive Hangul/Hanja.
For Ethiopic, which also exhibits two different behaviors,
such breaks within words are not allowed.

break-all

Breaking is allowed within “words”:
specifically,
in addition to soft wrap opportunities allowed for normal,
any typographic letter units (and any typographic character units resolving to the NU (“numeric”), AL (“alphabetic”),
or SA (“Southeast Asian”)
line breaking classes [UAX14])
are instead treated as ID (“ideographic characters”)
for the purpose of line-breaking.
Hyphenation is not applied.

Note: This value does not affect
whether there are soft wrap opportunities around punctuation characters.
To allow breaks anywhere, see line-break: anywhere.

Note: This option enables the other common behavior for Ethiopic.
It is also often used in a context where
the text consists predominantly of CJK characters
with only short non-CJK excerpts,
and it is desired that the text be better distributed on each line.

keep-all

Breaking is forbidden within “words”:
implicit soft wrap opportunities between typographic letter units (or other typographic character units belonging to the NU, AL, AI,
or ID Unicode line breaking classes [UAX14])
are suppressed,
i.e. breaks are prohibited between pairs of such characters
(regardless of line-break settings other than anywhere)
except where opportunities exist due to dictionary-based breaking.
Otherwise this option is equivalent to normal.
In this style, sequences of CJK characters do not break.

Note: This is the other common behavior for Korean
(which uses spaces between words),
and is also useful for mixed-script text where CJK snippets are mixed
into another language that uses spaces for separation.

Symbols that line-break the same way as letters of a particular category
are affected the same way as those letters.

这是一些汉字 and some Latin و کمی خط عربی และตัวอย่างการเขียนภาษาไทย በጽሑፍ፡ማራዘሙን፡አንዳንድ፡

<h1>窓ぎわの<wbr>トットちゃん</h1>

窓ぎわのトットちゃ
ん

窓ぎわの
トットちゃん

When shaping scripts such as Arabic
are allowed to break within words due to break-all the characters must still be shaped
as if the word were not broken (see § 5.6 Shaping Across Intra-word Breaks).

For compatibility with legacy content,
the word-break property also supports
a deprecated break-word keyword.
When specified, this has the same effect as word-break: normal and overflow-wrap: anywhere,
regardless of the actual value of the overflow-wrap property.

5.3. Line Breaking Strictness: the line-break property

This property specifies the strictness of line-breaking rules applied
within an element:
especially how wrapping interacts with punctuation and symbols.
Values have the following meanings:

auto

The UA determines the set of line-breaking restrictions to use,
and it may vary the restrictions based on the length of the line;
e.g., use a less restrictive set of line-break rules for short lines.

loose

Breaks text using the least restrictive set of line-breaking
rules. Typically used for short lines, such as in newspapers.

normal

Breaks text using the most common set of line-breaking rules.

strict

Breaks text using the most stringent set of line-breaking rules.

anywhere

There is a soft wrap opportunity around every typographic character unit,
including around any punctuation character
or preserved white spaces,
or in the middle of words,
disregarding any prohibition against line breaks,
even those introduced by characters with the GL, WJ, or ZWJ line breaking classes
or mandated by the word-break property. [UAX14] The different wrapping opportunities must not be prioritized.
Hyphenation is not applied.

Note: This value triggers the line breaking rules typically seen in terminals.

Note: anywhere only allows preserved white spaces at the end of the line
to be wrapped to the next line
when white-space is set to break-spaces,
because in other cases:

• preserved white space at the end/start of the line is discarded
  (normal, pre-line)
• wrapping is forbidden altogether (nowrap, pre)
• the preserved white space hang (pre-wrap).

When it does have an effect on preserved white space,
with white-space: break-spaces,
it allows breaking before the first space of a sequence,
which break-spaces on its own does not.

CSS distinguishes between four levels of strictness
in the rules for text wrapping.
The precise set of rules in effect for each of loose, normal,
and strict is up to the UA
and should follow language conventions.
However, this specification does require that:

• The following breaks are forbidden in strict line breaking
  and allowed in normal and loose:
  • breaks before Japanese small kana
    or the Katakana-Hiragana prolonged sound mark,
    i.e. characters
    from the Unicode line breaking class CJ. [UAX14]
• The following breaks are allowed for normal and loose line breaking
  if the writing system is Chinese or Japanese,
  and are otherwise forbidden:
  • breaks before certain CJK hyphen-like characters:
    〜 U+301C,
    ゠ U+30A0
• The following breaks are allowed for loose line breaking
  if the preceding character
  belongs to the Unicode line breaking class ID [UAX14] (including when the preceding character
  is treated as ID due to word-break: break-all),
  and are otherwise forbidden:
  • breaks before hyphens:
    ‐ U+2010, – U+2013
• The following breaks are forbidden for normal and strict line breaking
  and allowed in loose:
  • breaks before iteration marks:
    々 U+3005, 〻 U+303B, ゝ U+309D,
    ゞ U+309E, ヽ U+30FD, ヾ U+30FE
  • breaks between inseparable characters
    (such as ‥ U+2025, … U+2026)
    i.e. characters from the Unicode line breaking class IN. [UAX14]
• The following breaks are allowed for loose if the writing system is Chinese or Japanese and are otherwise forbidden:
  • breaks before certain centered punctuation marks:
    ・ U+30FB,
    ： U+FF1A, ； U+FF1B, ･ U+FF65,
    ‼ U+203C,
    ⁇ U+2047, ⁈ U+2048, ⁉ U+2049,
    ！ U+FF01, ？ U+FF1F
  • breaks before suffixes:
    Characters with the Unicode line breaking class PO [UAX14] and the East Asian Width property [UAX11] Ambiguous, Fullwidth,
    or Wide.
  • breaks after prefixes:
    Characters with the Unicode line breaking class PR [UAX14] and the East Asian Width property [UAX11] Ambiguous, Fullwidth,
    or Wide.

Note: The requirements listed above
only create distinctions in CJK text.
In an implementation that matches only the rules above,
and no additional rules, line-break would only affect CJK code points
unless the writing system is tagged as Chinese or Japanese.
Future levels may add additional specific rules
for other writing systems and languages
as their requirements become known.

As UAs can add additional distinctions
between strict/normal/loose modes,
these values can exhibit differences in other writing systems as well.
For example, a UA with sufficiently-advanced Thai language processing ability
could choose to map different levels of strictness in Thai line-breaking
to these keywords,
e.g. disallowing breaks within compound words in strict mode
(e.g. breaking ตัวอย่างการเขียนภาษาไทย as ตัวอย่าง·การเขียน·ภาษาไทย)
while allowing more breaks in loose (ตัวอย่าง·การ·เขียน·ภาษา·ไทย).

Note: The CSSWG recognizes that in a future edition of the specification
finer control over line breaking may be necessary
to satisfy high-end publishing requirements.

5.4. Hyphenation: the hyphens property

Hyphenation is the controlled splitting of words
where they usually would not be allowed to break
to improve the layout of paragraphs,
typically splitting words at syllabic or morphemic boundaries
and visually indicating the split
(usually by inserting a hyphen, U+2010).
In some cases, hyphenation may also alter the spelling of a word.
Regardless, hyphenation is a rendering effect only:
it must have no effect on the underlying document content
or on text selection or searching.

Hyphenation Across Languages
Hyphenation practices vary across languages,
and can involve not just inserting a hyphen before the line break,
but inserting a hyphen after the break (or both),
inserting a different character than U+2010,
or changing the spelling of the word.

Hyphenation occurs
when the line breaks at a valid hyphenation opportunity,
which is a type of soft wrap opportunity that exists within a word where hyphenation is allowed.
In CSS hyphenation opportunities are controlled
with the hyphens property.
CSS Text Level 3 does not define the exact rules for hyphenation;
however UAs are strongly encouraged
to optimize their choice of break points
and to chose language-appropriate hyphenation points.

Note: The soft wrap opportunity introduced by
the U+002D — HYPHEN-MINUS character
or the U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN character
is not a hyphenation opportunity,
as no visual indication of the split is created when wrapping:
these characters are visible whether the line is wrapped at that point or not.

Hyphenation opportunities are considered when calculating min-content intrinsic sizes.

Note: This allows tables to hyphenate their contents
instead of overflowing their containing block,
which is particularly important in long-word languages like German.

This property controls whether hyphenation is allowed to create more soft wrap opportunities within a line of text.
Values have the following meanings:

none

Words are not hyphenated,
even if characters inside the word
explicitly define hyphenation opportunities.

Note: This does not suppress the existing soft wrap opportunities introduced by always visible characters such as
U+002D — HYPHEN-MINUS
or U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN.

manual

Words are only hyphenated where there are characters inside the word
that explicitly suggest hyphenation opportunities.
The UA must use the appropriate language-specific hyphenation character(s)
and should apply any appropriate spelling changes
just as for automatic hyphenation at the same point.

In Unicode, U+00AD is a conditional «soft hyphen»
and U+2010 is an unconditional hyphen. Unicode Standard Annex #14 describes the role of soft hyphens in Unicode line breaking. [UAX14] In HTML,
&shy; represents the soft hyphen character,
which suggests a hyphenation opportunity.

ex­ample

auto

Words may be broken at hyphenation opportunities determined automatically by a language-appropriate hyphenation resource
in addition to those indicated explicitly by a conditional hyphen.
Automatic hyphenation opportunities elsewhere within a word must be ignored
if the word contains a conditional hyphen
(&shy; or U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN),
in favor of the conditional hyphen(s).
However, if, even after breaking at such opportunities,
a portion of that word is still too long to fit on one line,
an automatic hyphenation opportunity may be used.

Correct automatic hyphenation requires a hyphenation resource
appropriate to the language of the text being broken.
The UA must therefore only automatically hyphenate text
for which the content language is known
and for which it has an appropriate hyphenation resource.

Authors should correctly tag their content’s language (e.g. using the HTML lang attribute
or XML xml:lang attribute)
in order to obtain correct automatic hyphenation.

The UA may use language-tailored heuristics
to exclude certain words
from automatic hyphenation.
For example, a UA might try to avoid hyphenation in proper nouns
by excluding words matching certain capitalization and punctuation patterns.
Such heuristics are not defined by this specification.
(Note that such heuristics will need to vary by language:
English and German, for example, have very different capitalization conventions.)

For the purpose of the hyphens property,
what constitutes a “word” is UA-dependent.
However, inline element boundaries
and out-of-flow elements
must be ignored when determining word boundaries.

Any glyphs shown due to hyphenation
at a hyphenation opportunity created by a conditional hyphen character
(such as U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN)
are represented by that character
and are styled according to the properties applied to it.

When shaping scripts such as Arabic are allowed to break within words
due to hyphenation,
the characters must still be shaped
as if the word were not broken (see § 5.6 Shaping Across Intra-word Breaks).

For example, if the Uyghur word “داميدى”
were hyphenated, it would appear as not as .

5.5. Overflow Wrapping: the overflow-wrap/word-wrap property

This property specifies whether the UA may break
at otherwise disallowed points within a line
to prevent overflow,
when an otherwise-unbreakable string is too long to fit within the line box.
It only has an effect when white-space allows wrapping. Possible values:

normal

Lines may break only at allowed break points.
However,
the restrictions introduced by word-break: keep-all may be relaxed
to match word-break: normal if there are no otherwise-acceptable break points in the line.

anywhere

An otherwise unbreakable sequence of characters may be broken at an arbitrary point
if there are no otherwise-acceptable break points in the line.
Shaping characters are still shaped
as if the word were not broken,
and grapheme clusters must stay together as one unit.
No hyphenation character is inserted at the break point. Soft wrap opportunities introduced by anywhere are considered when calculating min-content intrinsic sizes.

break-word

As for anywhere except that soft wrap opportunities introduced by break-word are not considered
when calculating min-content intrinsic sizes.

For legacy reasons, UAs must treat word-wrap as a legacy name alias of the overflow-wrap property.

5.6. Shaping Across Intra-word Breaks

When shaping scripts such as Arabic wrap at unforced soft wrap opportunities within words
(such as when breaking due to word-break: break-all, line-break: anywhere, overflow-wrap: break-word, overflow-wrap: anywhere,
or when hyphenating)
the characters must still be shaped
(their joining forms chosen)
as if the word were still whole.

For example,
if the word “نوشتن” is broken between the “ش” and “ت”,
the “ش” still takes its initial form (“ﺷ”),
and the “ت” its medial form (“ﺘ”)—forming as in “ﻧﻮﺷ | ﺘﻦ”, not as in “نوش | تن”.

6. Alignment and Justification

Alignment and justification controls
how inline content is distributed within a line box.

6.1. Text Alignment: the text-align shorthand

This shorthand property sets the text-align-all and text-align-last properties
and describes how the inline-level content of a block
is aligned along the inline axis
if the content does not completely fill the line box.
Values other than justify-all or match-parent are assigned to text-align-all and reset text-align-last to auto.

Values have the following meanings:

start

Inline-level content is aligned
to the start edge of the line box.

end

Inline-level content is aligned
to the end edge of the line box.

left

Inline-level content is aligned
to the line-left edge of the line box.
(In vertical writing modes,
this can be either the physical top or bottom,
depending on writing-mode.) [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]

right

Inline-level content is aligned
to the line-right edge of the line box.
(In vertical writing modes,
this can be either the physical top or bottom,
depending on writing-mode.) [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]

center

Inline-level content is centered within the line box.

justify

Text is justified
according to the method specified by the text-justify property,
in order to exactly fill the line box.
Unless otherwise specified by text-align-last,
the last line before a forced break
or the end of the block
is start-aligned.

justify-all

Sets both text-align-all and text-align-last to justify,
forcing the last line to justify as well.

match-parent

This value behaves the same as inherit (computes to its parent’s computed value)
except that an inherited value of start or end is interpreted against the parent’s direction value
and results in a computed value of either left or right.
Computes to start when specified on the root element.

When specified on the text-align shorthand,
sets both text-align-all and text-align-last to match-parent.

A block of text
is a stack of line boxes.
This property specifies how the inline-level boxes within each line box
align with respect to the start and end sides of the line box.
Alignment is not with respect to the viewport or containing block.

In the case of justify,
the UA may stretch or shrink any inline boxes
by adjusting their text.
(See text-justify.)
If an element’s white space is not collapsible,
then the UA is not required to adjust its text
for the purpose of justification
and may instead treat the text
as having no justification opportunities.
If the UA chooses to adjust the text,
then it must ensure
that tab stops continue to line up as required by the white space processing rules.

If (after justification, if any)
the inline contents of a line box are too long to fit within it,
then the contents are start-aligned:
any content that doesn’t fit
overflows the line box’s end edge.

See § 8.3 Bidirectionality and Line Boxes for details on how to determine
the start and end edges
of a line box.

6.2. Default Text Alignment: the text-align-all property

This longhand of the text-align shorthand property specifies the inline alignment of all lines of inline content in the block container,
except for last lines
overridden by a non-auto value of text-align-last.
See text-align for a full description of values.

Authors should use the text-align shorthand instead of this property.

6.3. Last Line Alignment: the text-align-last property

This property describes how the last line of a block or a line
right before a forced line break is aligned.

If auto is specified,
content on the affected line is aligned per text-align-all unless text-align-all is set to justify,
in which case it is start-aligned.
All other values are interpreted as described for text-align.

6.4. Justification Method: the text-justify property

This property selects the justification method
used when a line’s alignment is set to justify (see text-align).
The property applies to text,
but is inherited from block containers
to the root inline box containing their inline-level contents.
It takes the following values:

auto

The UA determines the justification algorithm to follow,
based on a balance between performance and adequate presentation quality.
Since justification rules vary by writing system and language,
UAs should, where possible,
use a justification algorithm appropriate to the text.

For example,
the UA could use by default a justification method
that is a simple universal compromise for all writing systems—such as primarily expanding word separators and between CJK typographic letter units along with secondarily expanding
between Southeast Asian typographic letter units.
Then, in cases where the content language of the paragraph is known,
it could choose a more language-tailored justification behavior
e.g. following the Requirements for Japanese Text Layout for Japanese [JLREQ],
using cursive elongation for Arabic,
using inter-word for German,
etc.

none

Justification is disabled:
there are no justification opportunities within the text.

Note: This value is intended for use in user stylesheets
to improve readability or for accessibility purposes.

inter-word

Justification adjusts spacing at word separators only
(effectively varying the used word-spacing on the line).
This behavior is typical for languages that separate words using spaces,
like English or Korean.

inter-character

Justification adjusts spacing
between each pair of adjacent typographic character units (effectively varying the used letter-spacing on the line).
This value is sometimes used in East Asian systems such as Japanese.

For legacy reasons,
UAs must also support the alternate keyword distribute which must compute to inter-character,
thus having the exact same meaning and behavior.
UAs may treat this as a legacy value alias.

Since optimal justification is language-sensitive,
authors should correctly language-tag their content for the best results.

Note: The guidelines in this level of CSS
do not describe a complete justification algorithm.
They are merely a minimum set of requirements
that a complete algorithm should meet.
Limiting the set of requirements gives UAs some latitude
in choosing a justification algorithm
that meets their needs and desired balance of quality, speed, and complexity.

6.4.1. Expanding and Compressing Text

When justifying text,
the user agent takes the remaining space
between the ends of a line’s contents and the edges of its line box,
and distributes that space throughout its content
so that the contents exactly fill the line box.
The user agent may alternatively distribute negative space,
putting more content on the line
than would otherwise fit under normal spacing conditions.

A justification opportunity is a point
where the justification algorithm may alter spacing within the text.
A justification opportunity can be provided by a single typographic character unit (such as a word separator),
or by the juxtaposition of two typographic character units.
As with controls for soft wrap opportunities,
whether a typographic character unit provides a justification opportunity is controlled by the text-justify value of its parent;
similarly,
whether a justification opportunity exists
between two consecutive typographic character units is determined by the text-justify value of their nearest common ancestor.

Space distributed by justification is in addition to the spacing defined by the letter-spacing or word-spacing properties.
When such additional space is distributed
to a word separator justification opportunity,
it is applied under the same rules as for word-spacing.
Similarly, when space is distributed
to a justification opportunity between two typographic character units,
should be applied under the same rules as for letter-spacing.

A justification algorithm may divide justification opportunities into different priority levels.
All justification opportunities within a given level
are expanded or compressed at the same priority,
regardless of which typographic character units created that opportunity.
For example,
if justification opportunities between two Han characters
and between two Latin letters
are defined to be at the same level
(as they are in the inter-character justification style),
they are not treated differently
because they originate from different typographic character units.
It is not defined in this level
whether or how other factors
(such as font size, letter-spacing, glyph shape, position within the line, etc.)
may influence the distribution of space to justification opportunities within the line.

The UA may enable or break optional ligatures
or use other font features
such as alternate glyphs or glyph compression
to help justify the text under any method.
This behavior is not controlled by this level of CSS.
However,
UAs must not break required ligatures
or otherwise disable features required to correctly shape complex scripts.

If a justification opportunity exists within a line,
and text alignment specifies full justification
(justify)
for that line,
it must be justified.

6.4.2. Handling Symbols and Punctuation

When determining justification opportunities,
a typographic character unit from the Unicode Symbols (S*) and Punctuation (P*) classes
is generally treated the same as a typographic letter unit of the same script
(or, if the character’s script property is Common,
then as a typographic letter unit of the dominant script).

However, by typographic tradition
there may be additional rules controlling the justification of symbols and punctuation.
Therefore, the UA may reassign specific characters
or introduce additional levels of prioritization
to handle justification opportunities involving symbols and punctuation.

For example, there are traditionally no justification opportunities between consecutive
U+2014 — EM DASH,
U+2015 ― HORIZONTAL BAR,
U+2026 … HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS,
or U+2025 ‥ TWO DOT LEADER
characters [JLREQ];
thus a UA might assign these characters to a “never” prioritization level.
As another example, certain full-width punctuation characters
(such as U+301A [ LEFT WHITE SQUARE BRACKET)
are considered to contain a justification opportunity in Japanese.
The UA might therefore assign these characters to a higher prioritization
level than the opportunities between ideographic characters.

6.4.3. Unexpandable Text

If the inline contents of a line cannot be stretched to the full width of the line box,
then they must be aligned as specified by the text-align-last property.
(If text-align-last is justify,
then they must be aligned as for center.)

6.4.4. Cursive Scripts

Justification must not introduce gaps
between the joined typographic letter units of cursive scripts such as Arabic.
If it is able,
the UA may translate space distributed to justification opportunities within a run of such typographic letter units into some form of cursive elongation for that run.
It otherwise must assume that no justification opportunity exists
between any pair of typographic letter units in cursive script (regardless of whether they join).

The following are examples of unacceptable justification:

Some font designs allow for the use of the tatweel character for justification.
A UA that performs tatweel-based justification
must properly handle the rules for its use.
Note that correct insertion of tatweel characters depends on context,
including the letter-combinations involved,
location within the word,
and location of the word within the line.

6.4.5. Minimum Requirements for auto Justification

For auto justification,
this specification does not define
what all of the justification opportunities are,
how they are prioritized,
or when and how multiple levels of justification opportunities interact.
However, it does require that:

• Unless contraindicated by the typographic traditions
  of the content language or adjacent symbols/punctuation,
  each of the following provides a justification opportunity:
  • Word separators
  • The boundary between a typographic character unit of any block scripts and any other typographic character unit
  • The boundary between a typographic character unit of any clustered scripts and any other typographic character unit
• All letters belonging to all block scripts are treated the same,
  and all letters belonging to all clustered scripts are treated the same.
  For example, no distinction is made
  between the justification opportunity
  between a Han letter followed by another Han letter,
  vs. the justification opportunity
  between a Han letter followed by a Hangul letter.

Further information on text justification can be found in (or submitted to) “Approaches to Full Justification”,
which indexes by writing system and language,
and is maintained by the W3C Internationalization Working Group. [JUSTIFY]

7. Spacing

CSS offers control over text spacing
via the word-spacing and letter-spacing properties,
which specify additional space
around word separators or between typographic character units,
respectively.

7.1. Word Spacing: the word-spacing property

This property specifies additional spacing
between “words”.
Values are interpreted as defined below:

normal

No additional spacing is applied.
Computes to zero.

<length>

Specifies extra spacing in addition to the intrinsic inter-word spacing
defined by the font.

Additional spacing is applied to each word separator left in the text
after the white space processing rules have been applied,
and should be applied half on each side of the character
unless otherwise dictated by typographic tradition.
Values may be negative, but there may be implementation-dependent limits.

Word-separator characters are typographic character units whose primary purpose and general usage is to separate words.
In Unicode this includes
(but is not exhaustively defined as)
the space (U+0020),
the no-break space (U+00A0),
the Ethiopic word space (U+1361),
the Aegean word separators (U+10100,U+10101),
the Ugaritic word divider (U+1039F),
and the Phoenician word separator (U+1091F). [UNICODE]

Note: Neither punctuation in general,
nor fixed-width spaces (such as U+3000 and U+2000 through U+200A),
are considered word-separator characters,
because even though they frequently happen to separate words,
their primary purpose is not to separate words.

If there are no word-separator characters,
or if a word-separating character has a zero advance width
(such as U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE)
then the user agent must not create an additional spacing between words.

7.2. Tracking: the letter-spacing property

This property specifies additional spacing
(commonly called tracking)
between adjacent typographic character units.
Letter-spacing is applied after bidi reordering and is in addition to kerning and word-spacing. [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4] [CSS-FONTS-3] Depending on the justification rules in effect,
user agents may further increase or decrease the space
between typographic character units in order to justify text.

Values have the following meanings:

normal

No additional spacing is applied. Computes to zero.

<length>

Specifies additional spacing
between typographic character units.
Values may be negative,
but there may be implementation-dependent limits.

For legacy reasons,
a computed letter-spacing of zero
yields a resolved value (getComputedStyle() return value)
of normal.

For the purpose of letter-spacing,
each consecutive run of atomic inlines (such as images and inline blocks)
is treated as a single typographic character unit.

Letter-spacing must not be applied at the beginning of a line.
Whether letter-spacing is applied at the end of a line is undefined in this level.

p { letter-spacing: 1em; }

<p>abc</p>

Letter spacing between two typographic character units effectively “belongs” to the innermost element
that contains the two typographic character units:
the total letter spacing between two adjacent typographic character units (after bidi reordering)
is specified by and rendered within the innermost element
that contains the boundary
between the two typographic character units.
However, the UA may instead attach letter-spacing at element boundaries
to one or the other typographic character unit using the letter-spacing value pertaining to its containing element.

Note: This secondary behavior is permitted in this level
due to Web-compat concerns.

p { letter-spacing: 1em; }

<p>a<span>bb</span>c</p>

p    { letter-spacing: 1em; }
span { letter-spacing: 2em; }

<p>a<span>bb</span>c</p>

p    { letter-spacing: 1em; }
span { letter-spacing: 2em; }

<p>a<span>b</span>c</p>

p    { letter-spacing: 1em; }
span { letter-spacing: 2em; }

<!-- abc followed by Hebrew letters alef (א), bet (ב) and gimel (ג) -->
<!-- Reordering will display these in reverse order. -->
<p>ab<span>cא</span>בג</p>

Letter spacing ignores invisible zero-width formatting characters
(such as those from the Unicode Cf category).
Spacing must be added as if those characters did not exist in the document.

For example, letter-spacing applied to A​B is identical to AB,
regardless of where any element boundaries might fall.

When the effective spacing between two characters is not zero
(due to either justification or a non-zero value of letter-spacing),
user agents should not apply optional ligatures,
i.e. those that are not defined as required
for fundamentally correct glyph shaping.
However, ligatures and other font features
specified via the low-level font-feature-settings property
take precedence over this rule.
See CSS Fonts Module Level 3 § feature-precedence.

Note: In OpenType, required ligatures are expected
to be associated to the rlig feature.
All other ligatures are therefore considered optional.
In some cases, however, UA or platform heuristics
apply additional ligatures in order to handle broken fonts;
this specification does not define or override such exceptional handling.

7.2.1. Cursive Scripts

If it is able,
the UA may apply letter spacing to cursive scripts by translating the total extra space to be distributed to a run of such letters
into some form of cursive elongation
(or compression, for negative tracking values)
for that run
that results in an equivalent total expansion (or compression) of the run.
Otherwise,
if the UA cannot expand text from a cursive script without breaking its cursive connections,
it must not apply spacing
between any pair of that script’s typographic letter units at all
(effectively treating each word as a single typographic letter unit for the purpose of letter-spacing).
Both cases will result in an effective spacing of zero between such letters;
however the former will preserve the sense of stretching out the text.

Note: Proper cursive elongation or compression of a text
can vary depending on the
script,
typeface,
language,
location within a word,
location within a line,
implementation complexity,
font capabilities,
and calligraphic preferences,
and may not be possible in certain cases at all.
It may involve the use of shortening ligatures,
swash variants,
contextual forms,
elongation glyphs such as U+0640 ـ ARABIC TATWEEL,
or other microtypography.
It is outside the scope of CSS to define rules for these effects.
Authors should avoid applying letter-spacing to cursive scripts
unless they are prepared to accept non-interoperable results.

7.3. Shaping Across Element Boundaries

Text shaping must be broken at inline box boundaries
when any of the following are true
for any box whose boundary separates the two typographic character units:

• Any of margin/border/padding separating the two typographic character units in the inline axis
  is non-zero.
• vertical-align is not baseline.
• The boundary is a bidi isolation boundary.

Text shaping must not be broken across inline box boundaries
when there is no effective change in formatting,
or if the only formatting changes do not affect the glyphs
(as in applying text decoration).

Text shaping should not be broken across inline box boundaries otherwise,
if it is reasonable and possible for that case given the limitations of the font technology.

8. Edge Effects

Edge effects control
the indentation of lines with respect to other lines in the block (text-indent)
and how content is measured at the start and end edges of a line (hanging-punctuation).

8.1. First Line Indentation: the text-indent property

This property specifies the indentation
applied to lines of inline content in a block.
The indent is treated as a margin
applied to the start edge of the line box.

Unless otherwise specified
by the each-line and/or hanging keywords,
only lines that are the first formatted line of an element are affected. [CSS-PSEUDO-4] For example, the first line of an anonymous block box is only affected
if it is the first child of its parent element.

Values have the following meanings:

<length>

Gives the amount of the indent as an absolute length.

<percentage>

Gives the amount of the indent
as a percentage of the block container’s own logical width.

Percentages must be treated as 0 for the purpose of calculating intrinsic size contributions,
but are always resolved normally when performing layout.

Note: This can lead to the element overflowing.
It is not recommended to use percentage indents and intrinsic sizing together.

each-line

Indentation affects the first line of each block container
and each line after a forced line break (but not lines after a soft wrap break).

hanging

Inverts which lines are affected.

     Since CSS1 it has been possible to
indent the first line of a block element
5em by setting the 'text-indent' property 
to '5em'.

In CSS3 we can instead indent all other
     lines of the block element by 5em
     by setting the 'text-indent' property
     to 'hanging 5em'.

   For example, in the middle of
this paragraph is an equation,
which is centered:
             x + y = z
The first line after the equation
is flush (else it would look like
we started a new paragraph).

In a short line of text
There need be no wrapping,
But when we go on and on and on  
   and on,
Sometimes a soft break
Can help us stay on the page.

Note: Since the text-indent property inherits,
when specified on a block element, it will affect descendant
inline-block elements.
For this reason, it is often wise to specify text-indent: 0 on
elements that are specified display: inline-block.

8.2. Hanging Glyphs

When a glyph at the start or end edge of a line hangs,
it is not considered
when measuring the line’s contents for fit, alignment, or justification.
Depending on the line’s alignment/justification, this can
result in the mark being placed outside the line box.
The hanging glyph is also not taken into account
when computing intrinsic sizes (min-content size and max-content size),
and any sizes derived thereof.
(The interaction of this measurement and kerning is currently UA-defined;
the CSSWG welcomes advice on this point.)

A hanging glyph is still enclosed inside its parent inline box
and still participates in text justification:
its character advance is just not measured when determining
how much content fits on the line,
how much the line’s contents need to be expanded or compressed for justification,
or how to position the content within the line box for text alignment.
Effectively, the hanging glyph character advance
is re-interpreted as an additional negative margin
on the affected edge of its parent inline box;
the line is otherwise laid out as usual.
An overflowing hanging glyph should typically be considered ink overflow so as to avoid creating unnecessary scrollbars,
but the UA may treat it as scrollable overflow when the content is editable
or in other circumstances where treating it as scrollable overflow would be useful to the user. [CSS-OVERFLOW-3]

In some cases, a glyph at the end of a line
can conditionally hang:
it hangs only if it does not otherwise fit in the line prior to justification.
It is not considered when measuring the line’s contents for fit;
however, any part of it that does not fit
is considered to hang.
Glyphs that conditionally hang are not taken into account
when computing min-content sizes and any sizes derived thereof,
but they are taken into account for max-content sizes and any sizes derived thereof.

Non-zero inline-axis borders or padding between
a hangable glyph and the edge of the line prevent the glyph from hanging.
For example, a period at the end of an inline box with end padding
does not hang at the end edge of a line.

Multiple adjacent glyphs can hang together,
however specific limits on how many are allowed to hang may be specified
(e.g. at most one punctuation character may hang at each edge of the line).

8.2.1. Hanging Punctuation: the hanging-punctuation property

This property determines whether a punctuation mark,
if one is present, hangs and may be placed outside the line box (or in the indent)
at the start or at the end of a line of text.

Note: If there is not sufficient padding on the
block container, hanging-punctuation can trigger overflow.

Values have the following meanings:

none

No punctuation character is made to hang.

first

An opening bracket or quote at the start
of the first formatted line of an element hangs.
This applies to all characters in the Unicode categories Ps, Pf, Pi
plus the ASCII quote marks U+0027 ‘ APOSTROPHE and U+0022 » QUOTATION MARK.

last

A closing bracket or quote at the end
of the last formatted line of an element hangs.
This applies to all characters in the Unicode categories Pe, Pf, Pi
plus the ASCII quote marks U+0027 ‘ APOSTROPHE and U+0022 » QUOTATION MARK.

force-end

A stop or comma at the end of a line hangs.

allow-end

A stop or comma at the end of a line conditionally hangs.

At most one punctuation character may hang at each edge of the line.

Stops and commas allowed to hang include:

The UA may include other characters as appropriate.

Note: The CSS Working Group would appreciate if UAs including
other characters would inform the working group of such additions.

8.3. Bidirectionality and Line Boxes

The start and end sides of a line box
are determined by the inline base direction of the line box.
Although they usually match,
the inline base direction of a line box is distinct from the inline base direction of the containing block or the bidi paragraph.
The line box’s inline base direction affects text-align-all, text-align-last, text-indent, and hanging-punctuation—i.e. the position and alignment of its contents with respect to its edges.
It does not affect the formatting or ordering of inline content
(which is controlled by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm as applied by CSS Writing Modes [UAX9] [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]).

In most cases, a line box’s inline base direction is given by its containing block’s computed direction.
However,
if its containing block has unicode-bidi: plaintext [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]:

• If the bidi paragraph to which the line box belongs
  (that is, the bidi paragraph for which the line box holds content)
  has strong directionality,
  the line box’s inline base direction is that direction.
• If the line box is empty
  (i.e. contains no atomic inlines or
  characters other than the newline character, if any)
  or otherwise has no strong directionality
  (contains only weak or neutral characters),
  its inline base direction is taken
  from the preceding line box (if any),
  or, if this is the first line box in the containing block,
  from the direction property of the containing block.
  (This can result in an RTL line box whose contents have an LTR base direction.)

<block style="unicode-bidi: plaintext">
français
فارسی
français
فارسی
français
فارسی
</block>

<para style="display: block; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi:plaintext">
“<quote style="unicode-bidi:plaintext">שלום!</quote>”, he said.
</para>

<textarea style="direction: rtl; unicode-bidi:plaintext">

Hello!

</textarea>

Appendix A:
Text Processing Order of Operations

This appendix is normative.

The following list defines the order of text operations.
(Implementations are not bound to this order as long as the resulting layout is the same.)

1. white space processing part I (pre-wrapping)
2. text transformation
3. text combination [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]
4. text orientation [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]
5. text wrapping while applying per line:

   • indentation

   • bidirectional reordering [CSS2] / [CSS-WRITING-MODES-4]

   • white space processing part II

   • font/glyph selection and positioning [CSS-FONTS-3]

   • letter-spacing and word-spacing

   • hanging punctuation

6. justification (which may affect glyph selection and/or text wrapping, looping back into that step)
7. text alignment

Appendix B:
Conversion to Plaintext

This appendix is normative for the purpose of plaintext copy-paste operations.

When a CSS-rendered document is converted to a plaintext format,
it is expected that:

• The text-transform property has no effect.
• § 4.1.1 Phase I: Collapsing and Transformation is applied
  and any sequence of collapsible white space at the beginning of a block or immediately following a forced line break is removed.

Appendix C:
Default UA Stylesheet

This appendix is informative, and is to help UA developers to implement a default stylesheet for HTML,
but UA developers are free to ignore or modify as appropriate.

/* make option elements align together */
option { text-align: match-parent; }

Appendix D:
Scripts and Spacing

This appendix is normative.

Typographic behavior varies somewhat by language,
but varies drastically by writing system.
This appendix categorizes some common scripts in Unicode 6.0
according to their justification and spacing behavior.
Category descriptions are descriptive, not prescriptive;
the determining factor is the prioritization of justification opportunities.

block scripts

CJK and by extension all Wide characters
(see East Asian Width [UAX11]).
The following Unicode scripts are included:
Bopomofo, Han, Hangul, Hiragana, Katakana, and Yi.
Characters of the East Asian Width property Wide and Fullwidth are also included,
but Ambiguous characters are included
only if the writing system is Chinese, Korean,
or Japanese.

clustered scripts

Clustered scripts have discrete units
and break only at word boundaries,
but do not use visible word separators.
They prioritize stretching spaces,
but comfortably admit inter-character spacing for justification.
The clustered scripts include,
but are not limited to,
the following Unicode scripts:
Khmer,
Lao,
Myanmar,
New Tai Lue,
Tai Le,
Tai Tham,
Tai Viet,
Thai

cursive scripts

Cursive scripts do not admit gaps
between their letters for either justification or letter-spacing.
The following Unicode scripts are included:
Arabic,
Mandaic,
Mongolian,
N’Ko,
Phags Pa,
Syriac

Note: Indic scripts with baseline connectors
(such as Devanagari and Gujarati) are not considered cursive scripts,
and do admit such gaps
between typographic character units.
See Indic Layout Requirements. [ILREQ]

User agents should update this list
as they update their Unicode support
to handle as-yet-unencoded cursive scripts in future versions of Unicode,
and are encouraged to ask the CSSWG to update this spec accordingly.

Appendix E:
Characters and Properties

This appendix is normative.

Unicode defines four code point-level properties
that are referenced in CSS typesetting:

East Asian width property

Defined in Unicode Standard Annex #11 [UAX11] and given as the East_Asian_Width property
in the Unicode Character Database [UAX44].

general category

Defined in Unicode Standard Annex #44 [UAX44] and given as the General_Category property
in the Unicode Character Database [UAX44].

script property

Defined in Unicode Standard Annex #24 [UAX24] and given as the Script property
in the Unicode Character Database [UAX44].
(UAs must include any ScriptExtensions.txt assignments in this mapping.)

Vertical Orientation

Defined in Unicode Standard Annex #50 [UAX50] as the Vertical_Orientation property
in the Unicode Character Database [UAX44].

Unicode defines properties for individual code points,
but sometimes it is necessary to determine the properties
of a typographic character unit.
For the purposes of CSS Text,
the properties of a typographic character unit are given
by the base character of its first grapheme cluster—except in two cases:

• Grapheme clusters formed with an Enclosing Mark
  (Me)
  of the Common script
  are considered to be Other Symbols
  (So)
  in the Common script.
  They are assumed to have the same Unicode properties
  as the replacement character (U+FFFD).
• Grapheme clusters formed with a Space Separator
  (Zs)
  as the base
  are considered to be Modifier Symbols
  (Sk).
  They are assumed to have the same East Asian Width property as the base,
  but take their other properties
  from the first combining character in the sequence.

Appendix F:
Identifying the Content Writing System

This appendix is normative.

While most languages have a preferred writing system,
some have multiple, and
most can also be transcribed into one or more foreign writing systems.
As a common example, most languages have at least one Latin transcription,
and can thus be written in the Latin writing system.
Transcribed texts typically adopt the typographic conventions of the writing system:
for example Japanese “romaji” and Chinese Pinyin use Latin letters and word spaces,
and follow Latin line-breaking and justification practices accordingly.
As another example, historical ideographic Korean
(ko-Hani)
does not use word spaces,
and should therefore be typeset similar to Chinese
rather than modern Korean.

In HTML or any other document language using BCP47 tags for identifying languages to declare the content language,
authors can disambiguate or indicate the use of an atypical writing system
with script subtags. [BCP47] For example, to indicate use of the Latin writing system
for languages which don’t natively use it,
the -Latn script subtag can be added,
e.g. ja-Latn for Japanese romaji.
Other subtags exist for other writing systems,
see ISO’s Code for the Representation of Names of Scripts and the ISO15924 script tag registry. [ISO15924]

However, BCP47 script subtags are not typically used
(and are in fact discouraged)
for languages strongly associated with a single writing system:
instead that writing system is expected to be implied
when no other is specified. [BCP47] IANA maintains a database of various languages’ most common writing system
via the Suppress-Script field in its language subtag registry for this purpose.

Note: More advice on language tagging can be found in
the Internationalization Working Group’s “Language tags in HTML and XML” and “Choosing a Language Tag”.

When no writing system is explicitly indicated,
UAs should assume the most common writing system
of the declared content language for language-sensitive typographic behaviors
such as line-breaking or justification.
However, UAs must not assume that writing system
if the author has explicitly declared a different one.
If the UA has no language-specific knowledge
of a particular language and writing system combination,
it must use the typographic conventions of the declared writing system
(assuming the conventions of a different language if necessary),
not the conventions of the declared language in an assumed writing system,
which would be inappropriate to the declared writing system.

The full correspondence between languages and their most common writing systems
is out of scope for this document.
However, user agents must assume at least the following:

• If the content language is Chinese and the writing system is unspecified,
  or for any content language if the writing system to specified to be one of the Hant, Hans, Hani, Hanb,
  or Bopo ISO script codes,
  then the writing system is Chinese.
• If the content language is Japanese and the writing system is unspecified,
  or for any content language if the writing system to specified to be one of the Jpan, Hrkt, Hira,
  or Kana ISO script codes,
  then the writing system is Japanese.
• If the content language is Korean and the writing system is unspecified,
  or for any content language if the writing system to specified to be one of the Kore, Hang,
  or Jamo ISO script codes,
  then the writing system is Korean.
• The writing system is only considered
  to be unknown if the content language itself is unknown,
  or if it explicitly indicates an unknown writing system.

  Note: Mere omission of the writing system information
  when the content language is declared
  means the that the writing system is implied, not unknown.

Appendix G:
Small Kana Mappings

This appendix is normative.

Privacy Considerations

This specification leaks the user’s installed hyphenation and line-breaking dictionaries.

Security Considerations

This specification introduces no new security considerations.

Acknowledgements

This specification would not have been possible without the help from:
Addison Phillips,
Aharon Lanin,
Alan Stearns,
Ambrose Li,
Arnold Schrijver,
Arye Gittelman,
Ayman Aldahleh,
Ben Errez,
Bert Bos,
Chris Lilley,
Chris Pratley,
Chris Thrasher,
Chris Wilson,
Dave Hyatt,
David Baron,
Emilio Cobos Álvarez,
Eric LeVine,
Etan Wexler,
Frank Tang,
Håkon Wium Lie,
IM Mincheol,
Ian Hickson,
James Clark,
Javier Fernandez,
John Daggett,
Jonathan Kew,
Ken Lunde,
Laurie Anna Edlund,
Marcin Sawicki,
Martin Dürst,
Martin Heijdra,
Masafumi Yabe,
Masayasu Ishikawa,
Michael Jochimsen,
Michel Suignard,
Mike Bemford,
Myles Maxfield,
Nat McCully,
Paul Nelson,
Rahul Sonnad,
Richard Ishida,
Shinyu Murakami,
Stephen Deach,
Steve Zilles,
Takao Suzuki,
Tantek Çelik,
Xidorn Quan,
Yaniv Feinberg.

Changes

Recent Changes

The following normative changes have been made since
the December 2020 Candidate Recommendation.

• Define that distribute computes to inter-character, rather than merely behave the same;
  allow distribute to be implemented as a legacy value alias,
  since this is easier for some engines and does not matter for compatibility.
  (Issue 6156, Issue 7322)

• Clarify that language-specific hyphenation rules also apply to explicit hyphenation opportunities.
  (Issue 5973)

  Words are only hyphenated where there are characters inside the word
  that explicitly suggest hyphenation opportunities.
  The UA must use the appropriate language-specific hyphenation character(s)
  and should apply any appropriate spelling changes
  just as for automatic hyphenation at the same point.

• Define match-parent on the root element to compute to start instead of computing against the principal writing mode.
  (Issue 6542)

• Make authoring advice regarding text-transform a normative recommendation.
  (Issue 8279)

  Note: The text-transform property only affects the presentation layer;
  correct casing for semantic purposes is expected to be represented
  in the source document.

  Advisement: Authors must not rely on text-transform for semantic purposes;
  rather the correct casing and semantics should be encoded
  in the source document text and markup.

In addition there have been some minor editorial fixes.

Older Changes

See also earlier list of changes covering the 2020 and 2019 Working Drafts prior to that Candidate Recommendation
and the Disposition of Comments covering all comments between 2013 and 2020.

Let’s talk about the various ways we can control how text wraps (or doesn’t wrap) on a web page. CSS gives us a lot of tools to make sure our text flows the way we want it to, but we’ll also cover some tricks using HTML and special characters.

Protecting Layout

Normally, text flows to the next line at “soft wrap opportunities”, which is a fancy name for spots you’d expect text to break naturally, like between words or after a hyphen. But sometimes you may find yourself with long spans of text that don’t have soft wrap opportunities, such as really long words or URLs. This can cause all sorts of layout issues. For example, the text may overflow its container, or it might force the container to become too wide and push things out of place.

It’s good defensive coding to anticipate issues from text not breaking. Fortunately, CSS gives us some tools for this.

Getting Overflowing Text to Wrap

Putting overflow-wrap: break-word on an element will allow text to break mid-word if needed. It’ll first try to keep a word unbroken by moving it to the next line, but will then break the word if there’s still not enough room.

See the Pen overflow-wrap: break-word by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

There’s also overflow-wrap: anywhere, which breaks words in the same manner. The difference is in how it affects the min-content size calculation of the element it’s on. It’s pretty easy to see when width is set to min-content.

.top {
  width: min-content;
  overflow-wrap: break-word;
}
.bottom {
  width: min-content;
  overflow-wrap: anywhere;
}

See the Pen overflow-wrap + min-content by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

The top element with overflow-wrap: break-word calculates min-content as if no words are broken, so its width becomes the width of the longest word. The bottom element with overflow-wrap: anywhere calculates min-content with all the breaks it can create. Since a break can happen, well, anywhere, min-content ends up being the width of a single character.

Remember, this behavior only comes into play when min-content is involved. If we had set width to some rigid value, we’d see the same word-breaking result for both.

Breaking Words without Mercy

Another option for breaking words is word-break: break-all. This one won’t even try to keep words whole — it’ll just break them immediately. Take a look.

See the Pen word-break: break-all by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Notice how the long word isn’t moved to the next line, like it would have been when using overflow. Also notice how “words” is broken, even though it would have fit just fine on the next line.

word-break: break-all has no problem breaking words, but it’s still cautious around punctuation. For example, it’ll avoid starting a line with the period from the end of a sentence. If you want truly merciless breaking, even with punctuation, use line-break: anywhere.

See the Pen word-break: break-all vs line-break: anywhere by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

See how word-break: break-all moves the “k” down to avoid starting the second line with “.”? Meanwhile, line-break: anywhere doesn’t care.

Excessive Punctuation

Let’s see how the CSS properties we’ve covered so far handle excessively long spans of punctuation.

See the Pen Excessive Punctuation by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

overflow-wrap: break-word and line-break: anywhere are able to keep things contained, but then there’s word-break: break-all being weird with punctuation again — this time resulting in overflowing text.

It’s something to keep in mind. If you absolutely do not want text to overflow, be aware that word-break: break-all won’t stop runaway punctuation.

Specifying Where Words Can Break

For more control, you can manually insert word break opportunities into your text with <wbr>. You can also use a “zero-width space”, provided by the ​ HTML entity (yes, it must be capitalized just as you see it!).

Let’s see these in action by wrapping a long URL that normally wouldn’t wrap, but only between segments.

  <!-- normal -->
  <p>https://subdomain.somewhere.co.uk</p>
  <!-- <wbr> -->
  <p>https://subdomain<wbr>.somewhere<wbr>.co<wbr>.uk</p>
  <!-- &ZeroWidthSpace; -->
  <p>https://subdomain&ZeroWidthSpace;.somewhere&ZeroWidthSpace;.co&ZeroWidthSpace;.uk</p>

See the Pen Manual Word Break Opportunities by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Automatic Hyphenation

You can tell the browser to break and hyphenate words where appropriate by using hyphens: auto. Hyphenation rules are determined by language, so you’ll need to tell the browser what language to use. This is done by specifying the lang attribute in HTML, possibly on the relevant element directly, or on <html>.

<p lang="en">This is just a bit of arbitrary text to show hyphenation in action.</p>

  p {
    -webkit-hyphens: auto; /* for Safari */
    hyphens: auto;
  }

See the Pen hyphens: auto by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Manual Hyphenation

You can also take matters into your own hands and insert a “soft hyphen” manually with the ­ HTML entity. It won’t be visible unless the browser decides to wrap there, in which case a hyphen will appear. Notice in the following demo how we’re using ­ twice, but we only see it once where the text wraps.

<p lang="en">Magic? Abraca&shy;dabra? Abraca&shy;dabra!</p>

See the Pen Soft Hyphen by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

hyphens must be set to either auto or manual for ­ to display properly. Conveniently, the default is hyphens: manual, so you should be good without any additional CSS (unless something has declared hyphens: none for some reason).

Preventing Text from Wrapping

Let’s switch things up. There may be times when you don’t want text to wrap freely, so that you have better control over how your content is presented. There are a couple of tools to help you with this.

First up is white-space: nowrap. Put it on an element to prevent its text from wrapping naturally.

See the Pen white-space: nowrap by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Preformatting Text

There’s also white-space: pre, which will wrap text just as you have it typed in your HTML. Be careful though, as it will also preserve spaces from your HTML, so be mindful of your formatting. You can also use a <pre> tag to get the same results (it has white-space: pre on it by default).

<!-- the formatting of this HTML results in extra whitespace! -->
<p>
  What's worse, ignorance or apathy?
  I don't know and I don't care.
</p>
<!-- tighter formatting that "hugs" the text -->
<p>What's worse, ignorance or apathy?
I don't know and I don't care.</p>
<!-- same as above, but using <pre> -->
<pre>What's worse, ignorance or apathy?
I don't know and I don't care.</pre>

p {
  white-space: pre;
}
pre {
  /* <pre> sets font-family: monospace, but we can undo that */
  font-family: inherit;
}

See the Pen Preformatted Text by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

A Break, Where Words Can’t Break?

For line breaks, you can use <br> inside of an element with white-space: nowrap or white-space: pre just fine. The text will wrap.

But what happens if you use <wbr> in such an element? Kind of a trick question… because browsers don’t agree. Chrome/Edge will recognize the <wbr> and potentially wrap, while Firefox/Safari won’t.

When it comes to the zero-width space (​) though, browsers are consistent. None will wrap it with white-space: nowrap or white-space: pre.

<p>Darth Vader: Nooooooooooooo<br>oooo!</p>
<p>Darth Vader: Nooooooooooooo<wbr>oooo!</p>
<p>Darth Vader: Nooooooooooooo&ZeroWidthSpace;oooo!</p>

See the Pen white-space: nowrap + breaking lines by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Non-Breaking Spaces

Sometimes you may want text to wrap freely, except in very specific places. Good news! There are a few specialized HTML entities that let you do exactly this.

A “non-breaking space” ( ) is often used to keep space between words, but disallow a line break between them.

<p>Something I've noticed is designers don't seem to like orphans.</p>
<p>Something I've noticed is designers don't seem to like&nbsp;orphans.</p>

See the Pen Non-Breaking Space by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Word Joiners and Non-Breaking Hyphens

It’s possible for text to naturally wrap even without spaces, such as after a hyphen. To prevent wrapping without adding a space, you can use ⁠ (case-sensitive!) to get a “word joiner”. For hyphens specifically, you can get a “non-breaking hyphen” with ‑ (it doesn’t have a nice HTML entity name).

  <p>Turn right here to get on I-85.</p>
  <p>Turn right here to get on I-&NoBreak;85.</p>
  <p>Turn right here to get on I‑85.</p>

See the Pen Word Joiners and Non-Breaking Hyphens by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

CJK Text and Breaking Words

CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) text behaves differently than non-CJK text in some ways. Certain CSS properties and values can be used for additional control over the wrapping of CJK text specifically.

Default browser behavior allows words to be broken in CJK text. This means that word-break: normal (the default) and word-break: break-all will give you the same results. However, you can use word-break: keep-all to prevent CJK text from wrapping within words (non-CJK text will be unaffected).

Here’s an example in Korean. Note how the word “자랑스럽게” does or doesn’t break.

See the Pen CJK Text + word-break by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Be careful though, Chinese and Japanese don’t use spaces between words like Korean does, so word-break: keep-all can easily cause long overflowing text if not otherwise handled.

CJK Text and Line Break Rules

We talked about line-break: anywhere earlier with non-CJK text and how it has no problem breaking at punctuation. The same is true with CJK text.

Here’s an example in Japanese. Note how “。” is or isn’t allowed to start a line.

See the Pen CJK Text + line-break by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

There are other values for line-break that affect how CJK text wraps: loose, normal, and strict. These values instruct the browser on which rules to use when deciding where to insert line breaks. The W3C describes several rules and it’s possible for browsers to add their own rules as well.

Worth Mentioning: Element Overflow

The overflow CSS property isn’t specific to text, but is often used to ensure text doesn’t render outside of an element that has its width or height constrained.

.top {
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: auto;
}
.bottom {
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
}

See the Pen Element Overflow by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

As you can see, a value of auto allows the content to be scrolled (auto only shows scrollbars when needed, scroll shows them always). A value of hidden simply cuts off the content and leaves it at that.

overflow is actually shorthand to set both overflow-x and overflow-y, for horizontal and vertical overflow respectively. Feel free to use what suits you best.

We can build upon overflow: hidden by adding text-overflow: ellipsis. Text will still be cut off, but we’ll get some nice ellipsis as an indication.

p {
  white-space: nowrap;
  overflow: hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

See the Pen text-overflow: ellipsis by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

Bonus Trick: Pseudo-Element Line Break

You can force a line break before and/or after an inline element, while keeping it as an inline element, with a little bit of pseudo-element trickery.

First, set the content of a ::before or ::after pseudo-element to 'A', which will give you the new line character. Then set white-space: pre to ensure the new line character is respected.

<p>Things that go <span>bump</span> in the night.</p>

span {
  background-color: #000;
}
span::before, span::after {
  content: 'A';
  white-space: pre;
}

See the Pen Pseudo-Element Line Breaks by Will Boyd (@lonekorean) on CodePen.

We could have just put display: block on the <span> to get the same breaks, but then it would no longer be inline. The background-color makes it easy to see that with this method, we still have an inline element.

Bonus Notes

• There’s an older CSS property named word-wrap. It’s non-standard and browsers now treat it as an alias for overflow-wrap.
• The white-space CSS property has some other values we didn’t cover: pre-wrap, pre-line, and break-spaces. Unlike the ones we did cover, these don’t prevent text wrapping.
• The CSS Text Module Level 4 spec describes a text-wrap CSS property that looks interesting, but at the time of writing, no browser implements it.

Time to “Wrap” Things Up

There’s so much that goes into flowing text on a web page. Most of the time you don’t really need to think about it, since browsers handle it for you. For the times when you do need more control, it’s nice to know that you have a lot of options.

Writing this was definitely a rabbit hole for me as I kept finding more and more things to talk about. I hope I’ve shown you enough to get your text to break and flow just the way you want it.

Thanks for reading!