Hacksaw takes your entry's content and whittles it down
to a more manageable size. It strips the HTML and limits 
the excerpts by character count, word count or cutoff marker.

To use Hacksaw simple wrap the content you want to truncate
with the exp:eehive_hacksaw tag, like this:

{exp:eehive_hacksaw}
   {your_content}
{/exp:eehive_hacksaw}

There are several parameters you can use to control how
the content is truncated. These options are:

chars   = ""     // Limit by number of characters
words   = ""     // Limit by number of words
cutoff  = ""     // Limit by a specific cutoff string
append  = ""     // String to append to the end of the excerpt
allow   = ""     // HTML tags you want to allow. Ex allow="<b><a>"

For example, if you want to limit your excerpt to 100
words you would do this:

{exp:eehive_hacksaw words="100"}
   {your_content}
{/exp:eehive_hacksaw}

By default Hacksaw will strip all HTML from your excerpt.
If you would like to keep some basic HTML you can use
the 'allow' parameter to keep specific HTML tags. For
example, let's say you want to keep <p> and <b> tags:

{exp:eehive_hacksaw words="100" allow="<p><b>"}
   {your_content}
{/exp:eehive_hacksaw}

This would strip all HTML except paragraph (<p>) and
bold (<b>) tags. 

Another way to limit content is by a cutoff string. This
is similar to the way Wordpress's "more" feature works.
In your content you could add a specific string to indicate
the spot you want the excerpt to stop. Let's say you use 
"<!-- END -->". To cut the excerpt off at this location
you would do this:

{exp:eehive_hacksaw cutoff="<!-- END -->"}
   {your_content}
{/exp:eehive_hacksaw}

The 'cutoff' parameter can be coupled with the 'words' parameter
in case you forget to add the cutoff string to some of 
your entries. This way the excerpt will be truncated at
the cutoff string, OR after X words.

You can add any string at the end of the excerpt using the
'append' parameter, like this:

{exp:eehive_hacksaw words="100" append="..."}
   {your_content}
{/exp:eehive_hacksaw}

This would append "..." to the end of the excerpt.

For complete documentation go to http://www.ee-hive.com/hacksaw