How to apply padding to multiple lines in CSS

Apr 6, 2021

Learn how to apply padding to every line of wrapped text in CSS with box-decoration-break: clone, plus the -webkit- prefix that Safari needs to render it right.

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While re-designing some aspect of this blog I had the need to add some padding to each line of each blog post title.

I had this HTML:

<h1 class="post-title">
  <span>{{ .Title }}</span>
</h1>

I added this CSS:

.post-title span {
  padding: 0px 30px;
  background-color: rgb(254,207,12);
}

and obviously it worked, it added a 30px padding at the left and right side of the article title, as you can see thanks to the yellow background:

But with a longer title, and the text flowing to a new line, I experienced a problem because the padding was not applied at the end of each line:

See? There’s no padding before the A letter in the second line, and after the semicolon on the first line.

To fix that, I used this CSS property called box-decoration-break with the value clone, and its -webkit- prefixed property for Safari:

-webkit-box-decoration-break: clone;
box-decoration-break: clone;

Then it worked fine, across all browsers:

Tagged: CSS · All topics

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