CSS text justify with letter spacing

I know this is an old topic, but I faced this the other night. And found a suitable solution using tables.

Every letter shall be put into a <td> </td> I know it looks tedious, but if you wanna do this, it would be for a word or two, right? Or you always can use JS to fill it if is too much. However, this is only CSS and very versatile solution.

Using letter-spacing the letters get distributed properly. You should play around with it, depending on the width of the table.

#justify {
  width: 300px;
  letter-spacing: 0.5em;
}

<table id="justify">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>J</td>
      <td>U</td>
      <td>S</td>
      <td>T</td>
      <td>I</td>
      <td>F</td>
      <td>Y</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

See the example here

Crossbrowser safe, virtually nothing shall differ. Is just CSS.

I used it in My website which is in english and spanish. the subtitle under my name in spanish has an additional letter and it will step out the width. Using the tables explained above, it gets distributed to the same width automatically. Spacing it manually I'd had to define a whole condition for each language to go around that.


Here's a script which can do it. It isn't pretty, but maybe you can hack it to meet your needs. (Updated to handle resizing)

function SplitText(node) {
  var text = node.nodeValue.replace(/^\s*|\s(?=\s)|\s*$/g, "");

  for (var i = 0; i < text.length; i++) {
    var letter = document.createElement("span");
    letter.style.display = "inline-block";
    letter.style.position = "absolute";
    letter.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text.charAt(i)));
    node.parentNode.insertBefore(letter, node);

    var positionRatio = i / (text.length - 1);
    var textWidth = letter.clientWidth;

    var indent = 100 * positionRatio;
    var offset = -textWidth * positionRatio;
    letter.style.left = indent + "%";
    letter.style.marginLeft = offset + "px";

    //console.log("Letter ", text[i], ", Index ", i, ", Width ", textWidth, ", Indent ", indent, ", Offset ", offset);
  }

  node.parentNode.removeChild(node);
}

function Justify() {
  var TEXT_NODE = 3;
  var elem = document.getElementById("character_justify");
  elem = elem.firstChild;

  while (elem) {
    var nextElem = elem.nextSibling;

    if (elem.nodeType == TEXT_NODE)
      SplitText(elem);

    elem = nextElem;
  }
}
#character_justify {
  position: relative;
  width: 40%;
  border: 1px solid red;
  font-size: 32pt;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

#character_justify * {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  border: none;
}
<body onload="Justify()">
  <p id="character_justify">
    Something<br/> Like
    <br/> This
  </p>
</body>

Here is an other aproach using a jQuery snippet I wrote for this question : Stretch text to fit width of div :

DEMO

HTML :

<div class="stretch">Something</div>
<div class="stretch">Like</div>
<div class="stretch">This</div>

jQuery :

$.fn.strech_text = function () {
    var elmt = $(this),
        cont_width = elmt.width(),
        txt = elmt.html(),
        one_line = $('<span class="stretch_it">' + txt + '</span>'),
        nb_char = elmt.text().length,
        spacing = cont_width / nb_char,
        txt_width;

    elmt.html(one_line);
    txt_width = one_line.width();

    if (txt_width < cont_width) {
        var char_width = txt_width / nb_char,
            ltr_spacing = spacing - char_width + (spacing - char_width) / nb_char;

        one_line.css({
            'letter-spacing': ltr_spacing
        });
    } else {
        one_line.contents().unwrap();
        elmt.addClass('justify');
    }
};


$(document).ready(function () {
    $('.stretch').each(function () {
        $(this).strech_text();
    });
});

The css only solution is text-justify: distribute https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-3/#text-justify but the support is still very poor.

A small experiment using text-align-last: justify and adding spaces between letters. 

div{
	display:inline-block;
	text-align: justify;
	text-align-last: justify;
	letter-spacing: -0.1em;
}
<div>
S o m e t h i n g<br>
l i k e<br>
t h i s
</div>

Tags:

Css

Justify

Letter Spacing

Text Justify

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