Not knowing what the HTML looks like, this may or may not be a too simplistic solution. Break the text up into paragraphs (hopefully you will have open and closed <p> tags) and then count the number of words in each paragraph. When you have 1000 stop outputting. This should mean that all your tags are closed (if your HTML is good) and that you are not breaking in the middle of a paragraph which looks messy.

gav^