For me it is not easy to calculate the length of the Max Chars in ja news module.
I do not want the words in my intro text to be broken or finished with dots, and my intro text should be about the size of the picture so I use short intro texts .
For example if Max Chars is set to 160, and the legth of my intro is only 120, there is a blank beside the picture. If I managed to type a text between 140-150 it shows good.
Once I set 160 to 180 and many of the previously written articles lost their intro text , only pictures or nothing, but the title if no pics was inserted.
I needed to rewrite their parts before the READ MORE label.
In the following thread, I have seen a wonderful solution for the same type of problem with the Frontpage modul.
http://www.joomlart.com/forums/topic/ja_news_fp-ja_news-1-3-no-characters-being-displayed/
Is there a solution, perhaps something like this, for this problem?