Adding a "truncate" filter was a feature request for 4 years but finally landed in trunk, as far as I understand https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/5025 - so we’ve to wait for the next release or use trunk.
If you prefer to create your own custom template tag, consider to use the Django util Truncator in it. The following is a sample usage:
>>> from django.utils.text import Truncator
>>> Truncator("Django template tag to truncate text")
<Truncator: <function <lambda> at 0x10ff81b18>>
>>>Truncator("Django template tag to truncate text").words(3)
u'Django template tag...'
Truncator("Django template tag to truncate text").words(1)
u'Django...'
Truncator("Django template tag to truncate text").chars(20)
u'Django template t...'
Truncator("Django template tag to truncate text").chars(10)
u'Django ...'
Then you can put it in a template tag:
from django import template
from django.utils.text import Truncator
register = template.Library()
@register.filter("custom_truncator")
def custom_truncator(value, max_len, trunc_chars=True):
truncator = Truncator(value)
return truncator.chars(max_len) if trunc_chars else truncator.words(max_len)