text-align: justify; makes sure the text fills the full width of the div it is enclosed in.
margin: 0 auto; is actually a shorthand for four rules:
The first value is used for the margin-top and margin-bottom rules.
The whole thing therefore means margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0, i.e. no margins above or below the div.
The second value is used for the margin-left and margin-right rules.
So this rule results in margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto.
This is the clever bit: it tells the browser to take whatever space is available on the sides and distribute it evenly on left and right.
The result is centered text.
However, this would not work without
width: 30em;, which limits the width of the div.
Only when the width is restricted is there some whitespace left over for margin: auto to distribute.
Without this rule the div would take up all available horizontal space, and you'd lose the centering effect.
There doesn't appear to be a way. You can fake it by using justify and then wrapping the last line of text in a span and setting just that to text align center. It works ok for small blocks of text but is not a useful approach to large quantities of text or dynamic text.
I suggest finding somebody at Adobe who's involved in their W3C work and nagging them to bring up right/left/center justification in their next meeting. If anyone's gonna be able to push for basic typography features in CSS it'd be Adobe.
<div class="centered">
<p style="text-align: justify;">Cras justo odio, dapibus ac facilisis in, egestas eget quam. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque</p>nisl consectetur et.</div>
I was able to achieve the result by wrapping the content in a div tag and applying the attribute text-align: center. Immediately after the div tag I wrapped the content in a paragraph tag and applied attribute, text-align: justify. To make the last line centered, I excluded it from the paragraph tag, which then falls back to attribute applied in the div tag. You just have to strategic about how many words you want on the last line. I've included a demo from fiddle. Hope this helps.
Calculate the length of your text line and create a block which is the same size
as the line of text. Center the block. If you have two lines you will need two blocks if they are different lengths. You could use a span tag and a br tag if you don't want extra spaces from the blocks.
You can also use the pre tag to format inside a block.
Solution (not the best, but still working for some cases) for non-dinamic text with fixed width.Usefull for situations when there are a little space to "stretch" text to the end of the
penultimate line. Make some symbols in the end of the paragraph (experiment with their length) and hide it; apply to the paragraph absolute position or just correct free space with padding/marging.
Good compabitity/crossbrowser way for center-justifying text.
<div class="paragraph">Cras justo odio, dapibus ac facilisis in, egestas eget quam. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Praesent commodo cursus magna,<br><center>vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.</center></div>
<div class="paragraph">Cras justo odio, dapibus ac facilisis in, egestas eget quam. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Nullam id dolor id nibh ultricies vehicula ut id elit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Praesent commodo cursus magna, <b>__</b><br><div class="center">vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et.</div></div>
You can also split the element into two via HTML + JS.
HTML:
<div class='justificator'>
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s,
when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a
type specimen book.
</div>
JS:
function justify() {
// Query for elements search
let arr = document.querySelectorAll('.justificator');
for (let current of arr) {
let oldHeight = current.offsetHeight;
// Stores cut part
let buffer = '';
if (current.innerText.lastIndexOf(' ') >= 0) {
while (current.offsetHeight == oldHeight) {
let lastIndex = current.innerText.lastIndexOf(' ');
buffer = current.innerText.substring(lastIndex) + buffer;
current.innerText = current.innerText.substring(0, lastIndex);
}
let sibling = current.cloneNode(true);
sibling.innerText = buffer;
sibling.classList.remove('justificator');
// Center
sibling.style['text-align'] = 'center';
current.style['text-align'] = 'justify';
// For devices that do support text-align-last
current.style['text-align-last'] = 'justify';
// Insert new element after current
current.parentNode.insertBefore(sibling, current.nextSibling);
}
}
}
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", justify);
Here is an example with div and p tags
function justify() {
// Query for elements search
let arr = document.querySelectorAll('.justificator');
for (let current of arr) {
let oldHeight = current.offsetHeight;
// Stores cut part
let buffer = '';
if (current.innerText.lastIndexOf(' ') >= 0) {
while (current.offsetHeight == oldHeight) {
let lastIndex = current.innerText.lastIndexOf(' ');
buffer = current.innerText.substring(lastIndex) + buffer;
current.innerText = current.innerText.substring(0, lastIndex);
}
let sibling = current.cloneNode(true);
sibling.innerText = buffer;
sibling.classList.remove('justificator');
// Center
sibling.style['text-align'] = 'center';
// For devices that do support text-align-last
current.style['text-align-last'] = 'justify';
current.style['text-align'] = 'justify';
// Insert new element after current
current.parentNode.insertBefore(sibling, current.nextSibling);
}
}
}
justify();
<div class='justificator'>
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
</div>
<p class='justificator'>It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
</p><p>Some other text</p>
Disadvantage: doesn't work when page width changes dynamically.