I ran into the same problem and have been (kind of) able to figure it out.
The limitation to 10 characters can be found in application/helpers/export_helper.php in the
quexml_export function.
I'm here on a test system running
3.15.5 and the lines to look at are starting at line 1587 with a switch statement.
As an example take a look at the "MULTIPLE SHORT TEXT" in line 1644. Here the function
quexml_get_lengthth is called with
$qid, "maximum_chars" and
"10". This function is looking the the "maximum_chars" value for the current question (in the database) and if there is no "maximum_chars" set it will return the default value, which will be "10" in this case.
So what happens now is: if you have a Multiple Short Text and you haven't set the "Maximum characters" value in the Input section for this question the displayed boxes will be limited to 10, no matter how many characters are given in the answer.
You could now change these values here in the code (remember:
you shoudn't alter the core's code!). "24" seems to be the value for a DIN A4 paper to fully fill the row. But this dirty little hack will only move the problem from 10 to 24 characters. If you have an answer with more than 24 characters it will be cut off again.
The better and cleaner solution would be to add the "Maximum characters" value in the Input section to all fields affected. Same effect, much cleaner but this will probably take more time.
Either way you will be stuck with the new maximum value. So e.g. if you take "24" here and your answer has more than 24 characters it will be cut off. And if you take "48" here you will
always see two full lines of boxes, even if the answer has only a few characters!
So the perfect solution to me would be that limesurvey would add only the second and any further line here (up to the value given in "Maximum characters") if the answer needs this space. But there need some more lines of code to be added here.
Hope that helps!
PS: I would have put this in the bug tracker, but as my limesurvey account has been set up and linked to GitHub and the bug tracker doesn't seem to like or support this....
.
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