CSS max-height and overflow auto always displays vertical scroll - scroll

Question

I have a div class set up with the following CSS style:
div.multiple_choice{
border: 1px solid black;
max-width: 300px;
max-height: 200px;
overflow: auto;
}
The problem is, when the text inside doesn't force the DIV to reach the maximum height of 200px, the vertical scroll bar still shows up. I can click on the up and down arrows but it only moves the contents up and down by about a pixel or two.
This is occuring in Google Chrome (version 18.0) and Iceweasel 11.

Answer 1

As it turns out, another CSS style was causing the issue:
body{
line-height: 1;
}
Anyone interested in learning about how and why this would cause an issue, can read about the line-height property here

Answer 2

I was having an issue with this, and I found that having position: relative on the child elements was causing the problem. Obviously this can't be the solution for everyone, especially if position: absolute is being used, but for me it worked.

Answer 3

Just to put in evidence the #Kuba Orlik's solution (he posted as comment on the accepted answer) that's the only one that worked for me.
Add this on inside elements:
line-height: normal;
Note: Explicitly normal not 1 because it's different

Answer 4

I have encounter this problem.But I solved this use the following css style:
div.yourcontainer{overflow-y:auto;}
If the container was higher than max-height,the vertical scrollbar will show.

Answer 5

I had this problem when trying to wrap a list (flex column) of react components in a div, I resolved it by changing margin of elements within each list item to be 0.
The approach to troubleshoot this for me was to inspect the list items (perhaps each <li> in OP) and see what styles were making the div think each list item was larger than what was visible to the human eye.
Here is an example of inspecting a rogue margin on an icon within a list item in my project:
Solution is to set the style of that icon to have a vertical margin of 0, though in my application I just made all the margin 0 and added some padding-right.

Answer 6

I also had this problem using Bootstrap and nav. It occurred because bootstrap definds the li in nav-tabs as: .nav-tabs > li { margin-bottom:-1px; }. To counteract this, you must also do:
.nav-tabs > li:last-child {
margin-bottom:0;
}
Without setting the last-child, the following example would always show scroll, no matter how much content is in the list:
<ul class="navs nav-tabs nav-stacked" style="max-height:80px;overflow:auto;">
<li></li>
...
</ul>

Answer 7

I came across this bug earlier today. In my case a list of child elements had display: inline-block instead of display: block. Switching to display: block for my list of child elements in the truncated div fixed the issue for me.

Answer 8

In my case, the problem was with the font. We use font-family: Galano Grotesque. Apparently, this font is rendered higher than the computed height.
<div>
<p>some text</p>
</div>
So even without max-height, when the inner p and the outer div were both computed as 20px height, there was still a scroll bar (with overflow: auto) because the font was about 1px higher than expected.
So the solution can be any one of:
Use a different font.
Add padding to the outer div. This way it will be large enough to cover the extra pixel that comes from the font. In my case, adding one pixel of padding to the bottom and one to the top solved the problem.
Set line-height to a bit larger value (in my case, from 1.25 to 1.4), so it won't interfere with the font.
Set line-height to normal because then the actual value will be influenced by the font. However, according to Mozilla, this is not the preferred way.

Answer 9

The reason for the vertical scroll is obvious: the scrolled content is higher than scrolling area. But when you observe their heights, they are equal!
The causes are multiple but all come down to a common one: an element inside the scrolled content overflows it and makes the result taller.
How to fix this?
find the guilty element by looking near the bottom edge of the scrolled element (or to the right if you're scrolling horizontally), because they are the most likely to overflow. You should observe a height larger that their parent's.
see what makes them overflow, be larger than their container. As other answers suggest, it can be line-height, some margin, etc. Change those properties to make them fit, or as an alternative, set overflow-y: hidden to their immediate parent.