Truncated (shortened) descriptions for products and catalogs

Question

Is there any sort of tag attributes for the product and catalog descriptions that shorten them like the ones for I believe it is blogs (or maybe web app items)?
For whichever it is, I believe the tag is something like {tag_description, 100} for it to spit out 100 characters of the description.

Answer 1

This was doing my head in. I do not understand why {tag_description} won't allow character length for products. I used javascript to alter the text and thought I'd post my solution in case others are stuck and maybe to prompt people to improve on it. I have just barely started to learn js so this is most likely not the best way to do this. It relies on the product description being in <p> tags and takes only the first paragraph of the description but could be modified to just alter the string length.
In the small product layout I placed the full description in a div with display:none; and id="{tag_name_nolink}" so that each product has a unique id.
Then I placed the below code where I want the short description to appear.
<script>
var desc = document.getElementById("{tag_name_nolink}");
var shortdesc = desc.getElementsByTagName("P")[0].innerHTML;
document.write(shortdesc);
</script>