Full height content with the smallest possible width

Question

I would never think this is possible, but there are a lot of clever people here so I thought I'd ask. I'm looking for a way to have a full-height container whose width depends on how much content there is. I want the text to fill the area taking up the full height while using the smallest possible width. The height is known and hard-coded, the amount of content is not.

I'm working with something like this:

<div>
    <p>Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
    Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s,
    when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled....</p>
</div>

div {
    background:red url(http://lorempixel.com/600/400/);
    float:left;
    width:600px;
    height:400px;
}
p {
    background:#fff;
    padding:20px;
    margin:20px;
}

Normally content fills the page from top to bottom:

What I'm looking for is sort of the opposite, filling in left-to-right:

With less content, it should look like this:

Using full hard-coded height with width:auto produces this effect:

Is there any way to have the text fill the height with the smallest possible width, without hard-coding a width or having text overflow? It seems impossible and I have no idea how to approach it. Javascript/jQuery solutions welcome.

Answer 1

What I have in mind is a simple jQuery solution: in a while loop, set the condition such that the loop is run whenever the height exceeds the container height. In the loop, you increase the width of <p> pixel by pixel until the height no longer exceeds container height :)

$(document).ready(function() {
    // The 400-80 is because you have to subtract the container padding and the element's own padding
    while($("div > p").height() > 400 - 80) {
        currentWidth = $("div > p").width();
        $("div > p").width(currentWidth + 1);    
    }
});

http://jsfiddle.net/teddyrised/RwczR/4/

I have made some changes to your CSS, too:

div {
    background:red url(http://lorempixel.com/600/400/);
    float:left;
    overflow: hidden;
    width:600px;
    height:400px;
    padding: 20px;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}
p {
    background:#fff;
    padding: 20px;
    width: 1px;
}

Answer 2

This is not too difficult to do with JavaScript. I have no idea how to do it without JS (if that's even possible).

You can use another "invisible" div to measure dimensions until it gets to the 320px height while reducing its with by a set amount (even 1 pixel at a time, if you want to be as precise as possible).

var $measurer = $("<div>").css({'position': 'fixed', 'top': '100%'})
    .text($("p").text()).appendTo('body');

var escape = 0;
while ($measurer.height() < 320) {
    console.log($measurer.height());
    $measurer.width(function (_, width) { return width - 1; });
    console.log($measurer.width());
    escape++;
    if (escape > 2000) {
        break;
    }
}
$("p").width($measurer.width());
$measurer.remove();

http://jsfiddle.net/RwczR/2/