Introducing the CSS text-align-last Property

Sometimes tiny details that mostly go unnoticed can make or break the user experience. This can include subtle text shadows applied to a headline or proper spacing between different elements on a web page.

The text-align-last property is useful in this respect. It specifies how either the last line of a block or the line right before a forced line break will be aligned. This is important because the last line in a paragraph generally doesn’t have enough text to fill up the entire space. You may or may not notice the changes but it will improve the overall look of your website.

This tutorial will cover all the aspects of the text-align-last property including acceptable values, support and browser specific behavior.

Usage and Possible Values

It is pretty simple to use text-align-last in your projects. Here is a basic snippet to align the last line of text to the right:

.intro-graph {
  text-align: justify; // Required for IE and Edge 
  text-align-last: right;
}

This property has seven possible values. You are probably familiar with the usual left, right and center values. They align the text in the last line to the left, right and center of the container. The following demo shows the differences between these three values:

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 1 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

The fourth value, justify, aligns the last line in such a way that the text aligns its left and right edges to the left and right edges of the container. This is achieved by inserting an appropriate amount of space between words when necessary. Depending on the amount of text, you can use this property to completely fill the space on the last line without too much gap between words. The text in the second paragraph is also justified but since the last line only contains one word it is aligned to the left.

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 2 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

While left aligning the last line of text works for languages that are read from Left to Right (LTR), it will be wrong to do so with RTL languages. In such cases, assigning the values left or right can cause issues when you don’t know the language to be used beforehand.

Fortunately, you can use the keyword start to align the text to the starting position of a line based on the direction of text. This implies that setting text-align-last to start will left align the text of LTR languages and right align the text of RTL languages. Similarly, you can use the value end to align the text to the ending position of a line based on the direction of text. This will right align the text of LTR languages and left align the text of RTL languages.

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 3 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

The default value for this property is auto. In this case, the text inside the last line is aligned using the value of the text-align property unless text-align is set to justify. When set to justified, the text is justified only if the value of the text-justify property is set to distribute. Otherwise, the text is start aligned.

Noteworthy Points

The spec says the property requires text-align to be set to justify for text-align-last to work. However, only IE and Edge seem to implement this rule. The property works in both Firefox and Chrome without setting text-align to justify. The following demo should have all the text aligned to the right in Edge and IE. On other browsers, the last lines will be aligned based on the value of text-align-last and rest of the lines will be right aligned.

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 4 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

You might feel that the results are not as appealing as those achieved by setting text-align to justify. So, in most of the cases you will probably justify the text anyway.

The property still works even if the line break is forced by, let’s say, a <br> tag or something like that. You should also keep in mind that this property will align all the last lines of text inside the specified element and not just the absolute last line of content. For instance, if the text inside an article or div element has 3 paragraphs, each of them will have their last line aligned based on text-align-last.

If you intend to just align the absolute last line of your content, then depending on the situation, you can use the :last-child or :last-of-type selector. Take the code from the demo below as an example:

article {
  text-align: justify;
}

article p:last-of-type {
  text-align-last: right;
}

It aligns the last line of the last paragraph in our article to right. Rest of the lines are aligned based on the value of text-align property.

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 5 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

Similarly, you can also use other selectors like :even and :odd to change alignment alternately.

Occasionally, you will have some content where the last line and the first line of a paragraph are same. In other words, the paragraph has just one line. In this case, if you have specified values for both the text-align as well as the text-align-last property, the text-align-last property will take precedence. The only exception is when text-align specifies an explicit first-line alignment using the value, ‘start end’ .

Consider the code snippet below:

p {
  text-align: justify;
}

p:nth-of-type(2) {
  text-align-last: left;
}

If the second paragraph, in this case, has just one line then the text would be left aligned instead of being justified because text-align-last will take precedence. The demo below shows the CSS above in action along with two other examples.

See the Pen text-align-last — Example 6 by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

Browser Support

After covering all the important aspects of this property, let’s discuss browser support. The support for this property can be enabled using the “Enable Experimental Web Platform Features” in both Chrome and Opera from version 35 and 22 onward respectively. It is fully supported by Chrome and Opera from version 47 and 34 onward.

To use this property in Firefox, you will have to use the -moz- prefixed version. The values start and end are not supported by Internet Explorer. However, Edge fully supports this property. One notable browser that does not support text-align-last at all is Safari. You can read more about browser support here.

With the overall support of 61.85%, it won’t hurt to start using this property. Users with unsupported browsers are not going to notice any difference.

Conclusion

While you can use the text-align-last to properly align the text in your article, another interesting use case is to properly align the multi-line captions of your images. If you have some other use cases of this property in mind or have any questions, please share them with us in the comments.

Frequently Asked Questions about CSS Text-Align-Last Property