Paginated Two Column Layout?

[instinctdesign]

Sorry about the repost, I suppose I probably should have asked this question here rather than the general forum to begin with.

This one has been giving me trouble for awhile now so I finally broke down and decided to try asking someone.

Basically, what I am trying to do is take a block of text from a database and break it down into a paginated two column layout. Exact examples (this is the HTML version of the page I want to get database-driven) are here: with a horizontal article image ( http://hosted.forma3.com/stoop/site/html/art_1.html ) and another with a vertical article image ( http://hosted.forma3.com/stoop/site/html/art_4.html ).

The problem I'm having is that although I've been able to break the text up into pages or columns, I haven't succeeded in doing both. Though, there are also still errors when I've tried to do either one, namely with inconsistent break points that often come in the middle of words.

Here is an example of how far I've been able to get: http://hosted.forma3.com/stoop/fron...le_v4.php?id=47
...and its accompanying source: http://hosted.forma3.com/stoop/front_article_v4.txt

I need to limit each column to a set number of characters but without breaking words up or duplicating them across pages.

If there is a simpler way to go about this, I would love to hear it since each attempt I make only seems to get more and more complex. I would be much obliged for any help that could be rendered as this problem as been rather difficult to overcome.

(The text is from the Economist and thus temporary. I was too lazy to get my "lorum ipsum" text file. 🙂 )

[bad76]

Hi,
first you substring the text, then you find the first blank from the end.

Lets be 100 max chars in a column.

$first_col = substr($mytext,0,100);
$pos = strrpos($first_col, " ");

$first_col = substr($mytext,0,$pos);
$second_col = substr($mytext,$pos);

This will give you not words truncated.