Re: [Chrome DevTools] Multicolumn Support for Short Lines

[PhistucK]

chromium-html5 is better suited for this discussion (I have posted this reply in both of the groups and kept google-chrome-developer-tools as a BCC recipient).

The difference is that Chrome sets the width of the box according to the longest sentence in the box (before the text is laid out in a multiple column layout) and then applies the multiple column layout.

Firefox sets the width according to the finally rendered content.

I prefer the Firefox behavior, of course, but the specification defines the right behavior. Read it and create a WebKit bug (if you have not found existing bugs) if Chrome (and Safari) is doing the wrong thing.

☆PhistucK

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:40 AM, <cyber...@gmail.com> wrote:

I can't get Chrome to render song lyrics in multi-column mode correctly. For an example, see http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/d/oldruggc.htm.  For some reason, Chrome makes the lyrics box extremely narrow, though I can't see any reason from the style sheet it should do this.  Firefox has no problem with my pages, and I would like Chrome to render them just as nicely.

Can anyone see what's (if anything) I'm doing wrong?

[The Cyber Hymnal™]

I'm not sure I follow. The spec page at http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/#the-multi-column-model has this in the column width algorithm section:

(19)  if (column-width != auto) and (column-count != auto) then
(20)    N := min(column-count, floor((available-width + column-gap) / (column-width + column-gap)))
(21)    W := ((available-width + column-gap) / N) - column-gap;

I don't where the spec says how to determine the "available-width" value, unless I'm missing something. Specifically, I don't see a reference to "the longest sentence in the block." In my case, the available width would be almost 100% of the screen. How is Chrome computing such a narrow width?