text-wrap: pretty

Chrome 117, Safari 26.0 (improved algorithm); Firefox not yet (caniuse through 158).

Chrome 117Edge 117Safari 26Firefox no

Better paragraph wrapping: avoids orphan words, improves hyphenation and evens out rag on the whole paragraph (Safari evaluates the whole paragraph; Chrome the last lines). Body-text counterpart to `balance`.

Pretty wrapping evaluates line breaks across the paragraph to avoid a single stranded word on the final line and to keep the right edge from looking ragged, which is what typographers do by hand.

CSS

.fx-041 {
  text-wrap: pretty;
  max-width: 42ch;
  font-family: Georgia,serif;
  line-height: 1.5;
  hyphens: auto
}

HTML

<p class="fx-041">Pretty wrapping evaluates line breaks across the paragraph to avoid a single stranded word on the final line and to keep the right edge from looking ragged, which is what typographers do by hand.</p>

Fallback: Firefox wraps normally; harmless.

Source: caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_text-wrap_pretty and https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0/

Prompt

Set `text-wrap: pretty` on body copy, list items and descriptions (any multi-line prose), and `text-wrap: balance` on headings. It costs nothing where unsupported, so apply it globally to `p, li, dd, blockquote`.