CSS text justify with letter spacing
Is there a way to automatically justify words using letter spacing, each in its row, to a defined width, using CSS?
For example, "Something like this" would look, well, something like this:
Is there a non-obtrusive way to apply such styling to my text? I believe pure CSS doesn't have this option (at least not with CSS versions before 3, CSS3 seems to have a text-justify property, but it's not well supported yet), so js solutions would be fine also.
Answer
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>