Text box tyranny

[Soporose]

I'm going bonkers trying to figure out what rules/conditions govern the behavior of text in text boxes in XXP4 (developing a Web site). For example:

• The webpage is sized to 800 x 600.
  
• I place a text box on the page so the right-hand side stops about 20 pixels short of the page edge.
  
• I drop some text into the text box, have tried alignment at both centered and left justified, size it at say 20 pixels, and it wraps to two lines. The text box is deep enough to allow a couple more lines of text if needed.

In Xara it looks fine, but in both Firefox2 and IE7 the last word in the first line is truncated AT THE PAGE EDGE -- not at the position where we text box ends.

In other words the boundaries of the text box aren't honored and the text does not wrap.

The only way I can make it look right is to considerably reduce the font size to smaller than what I want it to be. Or I could insert hard line breaks, but that introduces its own pitfalls.

Grouping the text so it's exported as an image isn't an acceptable solution because I need that text to be read by search engine bots.

Any suggestions most welcome ?