I have implemented a simple Saxon extension function, renderedTextLength(), that lets you calculate the composed length of short text strings in XSLT. This is intended primarily to enable crude text fitting in FO-generating XSLTs. The accuracy is inherently limited because there's no way for my code to account for the effects of kerning, text sequeezing, justification, and so on, but it's good enough to allow, for example, setting the width of list labels to the length of the longest term in a definition list.

The files are provided under the GNU LGPL license.

The materials are available at: http://www.innodata-isogen.com/resources/tools_downloads/saxon_extensions

(This may require you to register on the Web site, for which I appologize in advance.)

Cheers,

Eliot