> OK, i agree with the change and I made it.  I'm attaching the new code.  

Well, I was about halfway through implementing it myself, so I just went
ahead and finished my implementation.  Along the way, there were enough
different cases to worry about that I wrote a little test suite; please
find it attached, along with my implementation.

Try typing M-C-x on the test suite; your implementation seems to behave
differently when the string is truncated, but too small to contain the
ellipsis.  In that case I just returned the truncated string.  On the
other test suite entries we agreed on the output.

(Incidentally, something is strange with your mail; your comments came
*after* the ----- Original Message ----- delimiter)