Question

Does anyone know a clever way to create even columns of text using php?

So lets say I have a few paragraphs of text and I want to split this into two columns of even length (not string length, I’m talking even visible length).

At the moment I’m splitting based on word count, which (as you can imagine) isn’t working too well. For instance, on one page I have a list (ul li style) which is increasing the line breaks but not the word count. eg: whats happening is that the left column (with the list in it) is visibly longer than the right column (and if there was a list in the right hand column then it would be the same the other way round).

So does anyone have a clever way to split text? For instance using my knowledge of objective c there is a “size that fits” function. I know how wide the columns are going to be, so is there any way to take that, and the string, and work out how high its going to be? Then cut it in half? Or similar?

Thanks

ps: no css3 nonsense please, we’re targeting browsers as far back as ie6 (shudder). 🙂

Answer 1

I know you’re looking at a PHP solution but since the number of lines will depend on how it’s rendered in the browser, you’ll need to use some javascript.

You basically need to know the dimensions of the container the text is in and using the height divided by the text’s line-height, you’ll get the number of lines.

Here’s a fiddle using jQuery: http://jsfiddle.net/bh8ZR/