XML multi-paragraph text data

I am a somewhat experience flash designer who is starting to dive into the power of AS. I am a little familiar with passing data such as image and mp3 information into a Flash file just by using XML and AS.

My question is, And would it be possible to count the number of characters already input from a multi-paragraph XML tag and then continue passing that data in (for a multi-column layout)? Would XML be the best solution?

example image: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~rab622/sample_lorem_fill.jpg

Thanks,
Ryan