chop title on a sizeable table

paris18m

here is what i am trying to do.
I curently have a table split in 2 with each cell width set to 50% inside these 2 cells i diplay titles taken out from a database. these titles might be big or small so i did write a couple of lines of php code to chop the title based say on a 1024x768 resolution.

but when a user is using another resolution the title may not fit on one line even if its choped, or it might be small since it was choped based on 1024x758 res.

is there a way that i can get the size of the cell in pixels or something so i can somehow calculate how much letters to chop????

Anon

Well, not really.

At some point, you loose control anyway. Different browsers use different font-sizes. Same browser on different operating systems use different font-sizes. Some people use text-only browsers, and are limited to 80x25 chars. You probably can't help them all.

However, if you assume javascript is enabled (wich you shouldn't), you can get the browsers resolution, and from there on calculate how long the text will be. (I.e. make an array with all letters as key, and a corresponding number of width-pixels for this char,.). Then, calculate how long it's allowed to be, and chop it (of course, you can use stylesheets to make sure some of the users get a certain font-type and size).. This, obviously, fails if the user resizes his browser window. (I assume you can use javascript to control this as well, but you definitly should not.)

And, there are ofcourse another option wich will (most likely) help you if you assume your users are not using text-only browsers. Take the text and create an image of it. You then have full control of the font-type etc, and as long as the browser supports graphics, it'll be okay (apart from longer download than text, plus requires more resources on your server).

Hope it helped 🙂

Anon

I don't think you can get pixel-widths of characters in Javascript (and don't forget kerning). If you knew the font and you knew the point size, and you knew the screen dpi (72 on Macs, 96-120 on Windows, and whats-your-fancy on X), then you'd have a chance...