Picture a table where each cell row is 50px tall, with 3 to 5 columns of varying length.

For example: thumbnail, name, description, price, options.

The thumbnail will always be the same size, but for efficiency of space, nothing else is.

My question is one of overflow. With long descriptions, overflow:hidden will keep things clean.

But the most aesthetic presentation would be to dynamically truncate the description with ellipses (...) somewhere just before the text runs off the end of the cell (like the ubiquitous [More...] feature, but first filling the cell as much as possible).

This is a typographically desirable feature, and I can come pretty close with php via strlen(), but I'm guessing that thanks to $('td').width(), jQuery can do it better. Has anyone seen this done right?

Cheers, and long live jQuery!

Neokio