A wireless communication transmitter (200) configured to segment a transport block into C segments, encode each segment into a set of encoded bits, determine, for γ encoded segments, a subset of size M0′ of encoded bits for each encoded segment and for C−γ encoded segments, a subset of size M1′ of encoded bits for each encoded segment, wherein the subset sizes M0′ and M1′ differ at most by P bits, where P is a product of a modulation order and a number of transmission layers over which the transport block is transmitted. The selected subsets of encoded bits are concatenated and grouped to form modulation symbols of the modulation order.