Use text-wrap: pretty for Body Paragraphs

What pretty Actually Does

text-wrap: pretty only touches the last few lines of a paragraph. It does not balance the whole block — that would be too expensive for body text. Instead, the browser optimizes the trailing 4 lines (Chrome's default) to:

1. Avoid orphans (a single word on the last line)
2. Avoid widows (a single short last line)
3. Choose better hyphenation points if hyphens: auto is also set
4. Keep punctuation off the start of a line

The CSS

article p {
  text-wrap: pretty;
  hyphens: auto;
  line-height: 1.6;
}

Why not balance?

Two reasons. First, balance is O(n²) and disables itself past 6 lines — the wrong tool for paragraphs that routinely exceed 10 lines. Second, fully balancing a paragraph would make every line the same width, which actually hurts readability for body text. Newspapers and books deliberately use ragged-right alignment because it gives the eye stable left-edge anchors as it returns from the end of each line.

Hyphenation interaction

pretty and hyphens: auto are designed to work together. With both enabled, the browser's line-breaking algorithm has more candidate break points to choose from, so the last few lines can be tuned more aggressively. Without hyphens, pretty still works but has fewer options.

Browser support

Chrome 117+, Edge 117+, Safari 17.5+. Firefox does not yet support pretty (as of early 2026) and falls back to default wrapping. Treat pretty as progressive enhancement — your paragraphs must remain readable when it's ignored.