Overflow Detect To Break Text Into Chunks?

I am trying to work out if this is possible: I have some html/text that I want to break apart into different elements (div tags), only one div tag should be visible/shown and at the bottom of the element are the number of "pages" (01/02/03/04...), each of these "pages" is actually just the next div element, the user can click on the "page number" so they can move to the next element (hidden initially) by using javascript to change which element should be displayed. Clicking on the the "page" will bring up that particular chunk of text. The div element is a specific size (width and height), and thats why only a certain amount of text can fit into it. These elements will be created dynamically from a database.

Right now I can do this by either manually forcing the user to break the text apart themselves by entering the text/html using multiple WYSIWYG editor text areas and giving them a rough amount of characters they can use and/or only allowing a certain amount of characters per textarea....Another alternative I thought of was to use php cut up the text into pieces and place them into divs by counting the number of characters based on the which font is theoretically being employed (I have a javascript script to detect if a particular font is available - how reliable it is I have yet to determine). But I was hoping that there was a solution in javascript to automatically detect when the text overflows and generate/change the number of divs, split the html/text up into the correct number of pieces and RE-generate the internal div page numbers (01/02/03/04...).

I guess there a number of problems with this idea that may stop it from being practical, such as which browser is being used, which font is being used and how the user has their text size set on their browser window... and probably other things I am not thinking of. I was hoping that by detecting if the text overflowed something could be done, but perhaps it is too complicated? Is there something out there that can do this? Is it possible? Perhaps too there are other solutions to the problem, either ones that are already out there or one that has to be built from scratch? I guess in the end my question is, is there a cleaner way of breaking the text apart in javascript by using overflow or something similar than doing it by counting characters with a server-side language?