Any way to trick completion--insert-strings into using only one column??

[Florian v. Savigny]

Dear elisp coders,

A Happy New Year to everybody.

The above function seems hardcoded to display at least two columns. Of
course, it so happens that I want it to display only one column in a
specific circumstance (the help buffer appears in a side window and
the completion strings are long, to be precise).

I have looked for ways of making the function believe it should only
display one column by re-defining some variable around it locally, but
this does not seem to be possible; it seems to display two columns
even if the completion strings are 1000 characters long.

Am I missing something here, or is the only way to get this behaviour
to redefine the function? (This could be done in quite a handy way,
e.g. the function could consider the width of the help window and
decide to show only as many columns as will show completely, or the
like.)

Best regards,

Florian

-- 

Florian von Savigny
Melanchthonstr. 41
33615 Bielefeld