For all you future perl users who get here:

I finally found a solution I'm going to use. It comes from further investigation and using Super Search, so check out this post which uses GD::Text::Wrap http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=342952

So I'm creating a much smaller version of that code into a subroutine and sending text to it, and getting values back so I can increase the counters and adjust accordingly.

It's beautiful.