Keeping Ditto Summary Output Clean When introtext Contains HTML

Summary extenders are convenient until the source text already contains HTML. Then a simple summary call can produce broken tags, awkward truncation, or unreadable snippets in listing pages.

Typical Situation

[[Ditto?
 &parents=`6`
 &tpl=`ditto-news-tpl`
 &sortDir=`ASC`
 &paginate=`1`
 &display=`10`
 &extenders=`summary`
]]

Main Problem

If the source field contains markup, the summary layer may cut through tags or count HTML as part of the visible text length. The result is messy output, especially in cards and archive pages.

Better Approach

• strip tags before truncation
• generate summaries from plain-text intro data where possible
• treat summary generation as formatting logic, not as raw field slicing

In older Ditto projects, many output issues were solved simply by normalizing the source text before the extender touched it.