Good PHP Text Pagination

Question

I'm working on an information warehousing site for HIV prevention. Lots of collaborators will be posting articles via a tinyMCE GUI.

The graphic designers, of course, want control over page lengths. They would like automatic pagination based on the height of content in the page.

Anyone seen AJAX code to manage this?

Barring that anyone seen PHP code that can do a character count and a look-behind regex to avoid splitting words or tags?

Any links much appreciated!

Answer 1

If it doesn't need to be exact there's no reason you can't use a simple word count function to determine an appropriate place to break the page (at the nearest paragraph I suppose). You could go so far as to reduce the words per page based on whether there are images in the post, even taking the size of the images into account.

That could get ugly fast though, I think the best way to do it is to allow them to manually set the page dividers with a tag in the article that you can parse out. Something like [pagebreak] is pretty straightforward and you'll get much more logical and readable page breaks than any automated solution would achieve.