How to Limit Text Length Using CSS

When designing a responsive website, controlling text length is crucial for maintaining layout consistency and readability. While HTML or JavaScript can be used to limit text length, CSS provides elegant solutions that are efficient and straightforward.

Understanding the Problem

You may want to restrict a sentence’s character count so it doesn’t exceed a certain number of characters on large screens, ensuring a clean design without relying solely on max-width. This task involves truncating the text visually while preserving the original content for screen readers and other purposes. CSS provides several properties that can be leveraged to achieve this.

Key Concepts

1. CSS Length Units (ch): The ch unit represents the width of the character ‘0’ in the current font. It’s useful for approximating character limits as it adapts based on the text size and font style.

2. Text Overflow with Ellipsis: Using CSS properties like white-space, overflow, and text-overflow, you can hide overflowed content and append an ellipsis to indicate truncation.

3. Multi-line Truncation: Achieving multi-line text truncation requires additional properties, often involving browser-specific extensions such as -webkit-line-clamp.

Implementing Single-Line Text Limit

To limit a single line of text to a specific character count (e.g., 75 characters), you can use the ch unit in combination with overflow properties:

p {
    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow: hidden;
    text-overflow: ellipsis;
    max-width: 75ch; /* Limits to approximately 75 characters */
}

In this example, any text exceeding 75 characters will be truncated and followed by an ellipsis (...).

Multi-Line Text Limit

For truncating multiple lines of text while maintaining a responsive design, you can use the -webkit-line-clamp property. Note that this method is primarily supported in WebKit-based browsers (like Chrome and Safari):

p {
    display: -webkit-box;
    -webkit-box-orient: vertical;
    -webkit-line-clamp: 3; /* Limits to three lines */
    overflow: hidden;
}

This CSS snippet will truncate text after three lines, replacing the rest with an ellipsis.

Considerations and Best Practices

• Cross-Browser Compatibility: While -webkit-line-clamp works well in WebKit browsers, ensure your solution degrades gracefully in others. Use feature detection or provide fallbacks where necessary.

• Responsive Design: Combine these techniques with media queries to adapt text truncation based on screen size and layout needs.

• Accessibility: Remember that CSS-only solutions affect only visual rendering. Screen readers will still read the full content unless JavaScript-based solutions are implemented for accessibility purposes.

Conclusion

Limiting text length using CSS is a powerful technique for maintaining design integrity across various devices. By understanding and applying properties like ch, text-overflow, and -webkit-line-clamp, you can create responsive designs that handle text truncation elegantly, ensuring both functionality and aesthetics in your web projects.