React Line Overflow

A simple, mostly css solution to multi-line text overflow

The Problem:

The natural inclination when faced with multi-line text overflow is to reach for css's text-overflow: ellipsis. Unfortunately this falls short and only works for text with white-space: nowrap, or simply put single line text. A quick web search will reveal many solutions to this problem. Unfortunately with every tool I saw you lose the advantages of offloading the burden of these calculations to the browsers css engine. These tools generally rely on some form of dynamically truncating the text until a length is found that doesn't overflow.

Why this is suboptimal:

This means that each block of text that you wish to have overflow into ellipsis is blocking your javascript thread as it calculates the perfect text length. 😱 All of those resources blocked just to solve a fairly simple problem.

The Solution:

But css can get us almost all the way there! A simple overflow: hidden hides all the extra text. No need to block the thread with calculations of how many characters fit. That leaves us with two issues left:

• Ensuring that the container height doesn't cut our last line horizontally in half
  • This should be responsive to various fonts to remain accessible to varrying languages.
• Appending an ellipsis for clarity.

Really all that's needed at this point is to grab the calculated line-height and multiply it by our desired number of lines and float a container with ellipsis over the end of our text block.

Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

| Jasmina Jacquelina💻 🤔 | Robert Pearce🤔 | Markus Greystone🤔 | Jessica Poémape💻 ⚠️ 🤔 | | :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: |

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!