How can I get long texts to automatically span over several columns?

Question

I would like to get the same behaviour that you get in Microsoft Word with several columns. When column 1 is filled, the text automatically starts in column 2.

I figured there would be a tag or technique on how to do this, but google gave me no usable results.

The obvious workaround would be to manually place text in three columns, but the would be a ton of work when changing the layout or font size.

Any advice?

Thanks - Codemonkey

Answer 1

You can easily do this with JavaScript. I am not aware of any pure-CSS techniques that can do this.

Answer 2

CSS3 has a multi-column feature that does exactly this. Setting column-count: n will split the text into n columns.

Since CSS3 isn't standardized yet, Mozilla and Webkit use the -moz-column-count and -webkit-column-count properties instead. Of course, IE doesn't support it yet.