Is there a way to make a textarea take a certain portion of the screen?
For example I'd like 2 textarea take each 50% of the screen width.
Is this possible and how?

Off the top of my head all I can think of is to put two textareas in either two columns of a single row table or two divs placed next to each other. Then set the cols to a suitably large number. I believe that it is then up to the browser to decide how it renders the text area.

graeme

Thank you for your answer graemef.
Both methods still try to accommodate the width defined in the textarea by adding a horizontal scroll bar.

Is there a simple solution in PHP?

PHP can only generate HTML code not determine how it is rendered in the browser. Because the browser window can be of different, widths, font displays etc it is not possible to control this, however I thought that most browsers now will wrap the text and only put a scroll bar in if required.

graeme.

Using tables definitely puts in a horizontal scroll bar in 2 adjacent textareas if the "cols" take more than the screen width, I am now getting a different result using <div></div> comprising 2 textareas which are put on top of one another when the combined "cols" exceed the width of the screen, they are correctly adjacent when "cols" is smaller.

I have to say I've got an unstable system (waiting for a new motherboard) that has been doing very strange things, this may be one of them if you think the browser should render this correctly.

Well unfortunately browsers tend to do their own thing. I also tend to use divs more than tables because of their greater flexibility. So maybe it would be best to stick with the divs but be aware that the rendering on some browsers may not be as nice as you would like.

all the best,

graeme.