Limit number of title characters in K2 apart from 1st item

Earlier I posted a project looking for the best solution to limit the number of characters in titles for category listings powered by the K2 extension on a Joomla website. However soon after posting, I tried using a simple if else statement that used the PHP strlen() function. This worked fine but it applies the function to every item whilst I need the first title to be full length and not trimmed. I briefly considered using the K2 content module to display the first K2 item but there is no where within K2 to apply an offset value. Therefore this displays the first K2 item twice which is not a satisfactory solution. The way forward I believe is to modify my earlier code amendment to use $key variable but I am not sure how to do this. Any decent PHP coder with knowledge of K2/Joomla should be able to do this in less than an hour.