Posted by rynato on 10/24/07 16:08

I have a <span> of width X px and height Y px. I want to read the text
of an article, which is stored in a mySQL table, and pass to that
<span> only just enough text to fit in it, along with a 'read more'
hyperlink which will take the user to the full article. I do not want
any overflow scroll bars to show. The font-size is set by external
stylesheet in em's.

How can I determine how much text is enough?

Approaches I've thought of:

-just set a semi-arbitrary number of characters, rounded to the
nearest full word, which allows the text to fit in the given space in
all browsers. Of course this approach won't take into account if the
user sets his browser's font size larger than usual.

-establish a table with em values for each character in a given font.
Calculate the width of each line of text by adding up the em values,
character by character, including letter spacing. Convert to pixels.
Compare to the allowed pixel width of each line. Do the same for
height, using line height instead of character width. Sounds like a
lot of work, though!

I've googled endlessly and haven't come up with very many ideas on how
to work this through...

anyone have any bright ideas? thx in adv

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