And lo’ and behold, during the weekend the first patch arrived in my mailbox. Written by Vegard Andreas Larsen, we now also support scaling against the width of a container. I didn’t even have an idea around this, and suddenly we have working code. The power of open source!

This adds two new options when initializing jqDFS:

• limitWidth: Uses the width of the element to determine the size instead of the height. Defaults to false.
• allowUpscaling: Allows the element to grow instead of shrink to fit the provided area. Only works when limitWidth is active currently. Defaults to false.

The original scale method should probably be rewritten to also use allowUpscaling, so if anyone feels slightly hackish tonight, just send the patch my way!

To paraphrase from the INSTALL file:

In a production system, use jquery-dynamicfontsize.min.js. For debugging
or developing, use jquery-dynamicfontsize.js.

Usage:

Include a reference to the script after loading jQuery:

<script src="jquery-dynamicfontsize.min.js"></script>

Then call:

$("#idOfElement").dynamicFontSize();

This will attempt to scale the font size of the element down with 10% in
3 iterations, stopping when a value has been found that allows the element
to only use one text line.

$("h1").dynamicFontSize();

This will attempt to scale all h1 elements. Other jQuery selectors will also
work.

Options supported:

    * squeezeFactor: A float value that will be used as the squeeze factor
      for each step. 0.1 means that we'll attempt to scale the font-size down
      10% for each iteration. Defaults to 0.1.
    * lines: The number of lines we'll attempt to fit the text to. When the
      text fits this (or a smaller) amount of lines, we'll stop scaling.
      Defaults to 1.
    * tries: The number of iterations we'll try before we give up and go with
      the last result. Defaults to 3.

We do currently not care for the line-height of elements, so if you’re feeling slightly hackish tonight, feel free to add the required piece of javascript goodness. Any suitable patches are welcome!