Scrolling news items

Hi

A very common requirement is to scroll news items which might consist of a title, a post date, a teaser, and a "read more" link (say). The news items should scroll upwards in a fixed size block, stopping briefly when the full item is displayed to allow the viewer time to click on the "read more" link to the full node. The news items must always be nose-to-tail i.e. no large gaps between them.

After some experimentation I have concluded that the only way to achieve this is for the displayed fields to always fill exactly the same number of lines. As the title, the post date, and read more link will all normally only take 1 line each, this is really a question of ensuring the teasers are all the same length.

If the items are not all exactly equal in line length from a display perspective then there are 3 possible scenarios :

1> The block height is set to the length of the longest item. In this case large gaps appear in the slideshow.
2> The block height is set to a size less than that of the longest item. In this case the "read more" link commonly displayed as the last field will be cut off.
3> The block is sized on the fly for each node. In this case any subsequent blocks will jump up and down the page as the Views Slideshow block re-sizes itself.

My first question is simply am I right ?

My second is any suggestions ?

Cheers

Dave

P.S. This module rocks and this seems to be an unfortunate, if popular, use case. When the content is fixed size as is usually the case in image based slideshows everything is tikety-boo.