CSS: Set font to a size so the text would occupy whole container

Question

Possible Duplicate:
resize font to fit in a div (on one line)

For a small flashcard maker app I need to set the correct font size so text would fill all the available width of a fixed-size container; like the text in the four boxes in this picture:

A solution using PHP GD has been provided to this question. Is there a client side solution with css or javascript to this problem?

Answer 1

it's not brute force ;)

HTML:

<span id="txt">Lorem</span>
<div id="card"></div>

CSS:

#card { 
    width: 150px; 
    height: 50px;
    border: 1px solid black 
}

#txt {
    display: none
}

JS (using JQuery):

var size_w = (150/$('#txt').width() - 0.05);
var size_h = (50/$('#txt').height() - 0.05);
var size = size_w>size_h?size_h:size_w;
$('#card').css('font-size',  size + 'em');
$('#card').text($('#txt').text());

fiddle here: http://jsfiddle.net/cwfDr/

All right, now it covers both height and width. ;)

Answer 2

I wrote this tiny, tiny plugin to do it to fit the browser window.

            (function($){
                $.fn.extend({ 
                    sizeFont: function() {
                        return this.each(function() {
                            $obj = $(this);
                            $obj.css({fontSize:($(window).width()/$obj.width())+'em'});
                        });
                    }
                });
            })(jQuery);

I'm sure you can modify this to fit your needs by switching $(window) to whatever you want. Here is it live:

http://cullywright.com/

Answer 3

I had looked into this years ago, and we decided the only logical way of doing it that didn't induce insanity was using images instead of text for the numbers, and then calculating the size of the images needed based on the width of the container (we also had text). Also, we used a fixed width font selected for the numbers/text.

Another alternative is flash text replacement, which gives you more control: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr

There may be other techniques that have developed over the last few years, and maybe CSS3 could help (although it may not be broadly supported if it does), but the image technique gave us the best bang for the buck.