Excerpt by Lines, not Words or Characters…

It’s looking like wordpress plugins such as Excerpt Editor and Advanced Excerpt both use the word or characters to judge how much to display in an excerpt.

It just doesn’t look that clean to me…Is there a way to do it by line? That way, all excerpts look uniform, say at 4 lines each.

In my theme here is the code for the excerpts:

function wpe_latest_posts($length) {
return 55;

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-Matt