CSS Modern multi-line ellipsis

— 3 minute read

I wrote an article on truncating text with ellipsis, and we used a fail-safe version for the multi-line ellipsis.

Today I'm looking into a more modern and straightforward approach to solve this truncate problem.

The end result:

See the Pen CSS Modern multi-line ellipsis by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

HTML Structure

The HTML for this assignment is super basic. We just need one enormous paragraph.

<p>
  Morbi rutrum lectus turpis, sit amet sollicitudin eros condimentum vitae. Integer
  consequat eros vel tortor tempor, et vulputate turpis pretium. Suspendisse vel metus
  sem. Aenean sollicitudin luctus est ac gravida. Curabitur eros tellus, scelerisque sit
  amet suscipit consequat, laoreet at quam. Nullam massa ante, tincidunt quis metus ut,
  consequat facilisis risus. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient
  montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
</p>

This is way bigger than just three lines, right. Let's see how we can solve this in the modern-day age.

CSS Truncate text on 3 lines

We'll be using line-clamp to solve this to get right to it. Line-clamp will allow us to state how many lines it should cut the text.

p {
  width: 200px;
  display: -webkit-box;
  -webkit-line-clamp: 3;
  -webkit-box-orient: vertical;
  overflow: hidden;
}

As you may have spotted, for now, this only works if the display method is webkit-box.

So far, this is by far the easiest way to achieve this, but it has some odds and ends, like having to use the display format.

Browser support

I was surprised the browser support for this is quite good. Most modern browsers support it out of the box.

CSS webkit-line-clamp

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