Resize font depending on string length

Question

I have a vertical menu and i want to make it localizable, but localized strings in menu elements often goes out off the edge.
So the question is how to make font resizable depending on the string length in CSS. And if possible, without JavaScript.
Thanks!

UPD: JQuery isn't acceptable. Any way in Pure JS?

Answer 1

You should make familiar with using plugins, they save you much time and of course they're very reliable (they are written by experienced scripters/programmers and have been tested by community). However looks like you want some pure JS solution. I've just made this code for you. It works fairly OK (although I'm not sure if it's as good as some plugins). The only requirement is the element (which you want to adjust the font-size accordingly to the text length) should contain plain text, not some HTML code.

The idea to implement it using pure JS is simple, you need some dummy element created using script, this dummy element is used to measure the size of the text. We need to adjust the font-size of the dummy element until the size of the text (as well as of the dummy element) should be confined to the size of the element (whose font-size you want to adjust). I made the code very clearly, hope you understand it better after reading the code:

//we just need 1 dummy element for the whole page.
var dummy = document.createElement('div');
dummy.className = 'dummy';
var inSingleLineMode, inMultilineMode;    
//function used to adjust the font-size of the element
//so that the width is fixed (single-line mode) or both the width and height are 
//fixed (multi-line mode), of course the text should be contained within 
//the fixed width and height.
function adjustFontSize(element, singleLine){
  if(!element.innerHTML) return;
  var elementStyle = getComputedStyle(element);        
  dummy.style.font = elementStyle.font;
  initMode(singleLine, function(){ dummy.style.width = elementStyle.width });
  dummy.style.padding = elementStyle.padding;
  dummy.style.boxSizing = elementStyle.boxSizing;
  dummy.innerHTML = element.innerHTML;
  document.body.appendChild(dummy);
  var dummyStyle = getComputedStyle(dummy);          
  while(singleLine ? parseInt(dummyStyle.width) < parseInt(elementStyle.width) :
                     parseInt(dummyStyle.height) < parseInt(elementStyle.height)){
    dummy.style.fontSize = parseFloat(dummyStyle.fontSize) + 1 + 'px';
    dummyStyle = getComputedStyle(dummy);
  }
  while(singleLine ? parseInt(dummyStyle.width) > parseInt(elementStyle.width) :
                     parseInt(dummyStyle.height) > parseInt(elementStyle.height)){
    dummy.style.fontSize = parseFloat(dummyStyle.fontSize) - 1 + 'px';
    dummyStyle = getComputedStyle(dummy);
  }    
  element.style.fontSize = dummyStyle.fontSize;
  document.body.removeChild(dummy);
}
function initMode(singleLine, callback){
  if(!dummy) return;
  if(singleLine&&!inSingleLineMode) {
    dummy.style.whiteSpace = 'nowrap';
    dummy.style.width = 'auto';
    dummy.style.display = "inline-block";
    inSingleLineMode = true;
    inMultiLineMode = false;
  } else if(!singleLine&&!inMultilineMode) {
    if(callback) callback();
    dummy.style.whiteSpace = 'initial';
    dummy.style.display = "block";
    dummy.style.wordWrap = 'break-word';
    inMultilineMode = true;
    inSingleLineMode = false;
  }
}

Demo.

In the demo, you can see that the first menu #menu1 is the Vietnamese word meaning Chrysanthemum while the second menu #menu2 is of course the English word Chrysanthemum. They have much different length, however both are supposed to have fixed width of 100px, hence the second menu #menu2 should have smaller font-size to fit the space.