Getting web browswers to cooperate in layout especially to printers is problematic. If you get one working the others will not work. You may need to go to another format like postscript or pdf so that you get control over the page layout on printing.

As for buffering the string, perl will automatically allocate enough space to hold the string. If you mean truncating the string to a certain maximum length you can use html attributes on the textarea to limit the size that way (these of course can be worked around by a user) and/or use substr() to trim the end off at the desired length.

Update: Padding the value can be accomplished with sprintf (or printf) with a "%-4000s" format specifier which will add a lot of blank space after the string which will make your page load more slowly. Also notes the span deal in css and makes note to self to try that out.

In reply to Re: Is there any easy way to buffer a string? by dga
in thread Is there any easy way to buffer a string? by jryan

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