At 11:51 AM 5/3/2006, Phillip S. Baker wrote:
I have some articles stored in a MySQL DB.
What I want is if the article is above a certain length in
characters, to page article through a few pages for site readability.
So I would want to print X number of words/characters.
Save the where the pointer is, move on to the next page, and display
the same amount and so on for as many pages as needed.
Phillip,
There's a fundamental problem with trying to slice text into
resizable web pages the same way it's sliced on paper. Paper pages
work because they're set in a fixed font size. When you change the
ratio of font size to column width, the places where lines of text
wrap changes. Because of the varying lengths of words, strings of
words spill over to the next line in non-linear rates. Unless you
use a fixed font size (boo, hiss) or you change the font size and the
column width at exactly the same rate by sizing your layout in ems,
your text columns are going to change in height (line-count) with
font resizing.
This means that the amount of text that fits on a page changes
dynamically with browser events and cannot be predicted or controlled
server-side by PHP -- unless you can accept a layout sized in ems
both horizontally and vertically, which few people seem willing to
do, or you force your readers to accept your choice of font size,
which would be an ironic and depressing decision for a modern
publisher to make.
Here's a related problem: Say you calculate the number of words that
can fit in N column inches and dish out that much text from your
database, and let's say that the last line on the page is in
mid-paragraph. When the user resizes their browser font, the
word-wrap will change and suddenly the last line on the page will end
halfway across the column even though it isn't the end of the
sentence or the paragraph.
In addition, all this means dynamically changing widows and orphans,
also of concern to the serious typographer.
As a final coup de grace, any calculation of words per line must take
into account the metrics of the specific font being rendered, a
practical impossibility when fonts are selected from the users'
computers and not the publisher's.
While PHP and MySQL can supply the raw text from the server, these
issues beg for a client-size solution at the reader's end.
My first choice of solution would be to size my columns in ems to
allow the entire layout to zoom both horizontally and vertically with
font-size, in which case your problem of how to extract contiguous
text strings again becomes relevant. And that's trivial, really,
compared to the algorithm you'll have to write to predict how many
words will wrap into a given number of lines when you can't even
predict the font being used.
You could make the problem much more solvable by dishing up whole
paragraphs only, and learning to accept (nay, embrace!) the resultant
variation in page-length.
Paul
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