jQuery Trunk8

Have you written an app where you have an unknown length text block that’s going to go into a grid layout. Perhaps the description to an event? You expect most descriptions to be 1 or 2 lines max, but then someone goes and copy-pastes a word document into your description field.

A great solution to this problem is a jquery plugin Trunk8. You can checkout the demos or view the source on github.

Ultimately trunk8 takes a very long textblock and based on configurable settings will truncate it to … ellipses. The great thing about trunk8 is that it actually analyzes the element that contains the text and bases it’s calculations on actual screen space. It doesn’t do a naive attempt based on number of characters. It also supports html, this was key for me. Using it to truncate a long markdown description block when in general it will consistent of 1 or 2 lines.