I suppose one could render the text off-screen or in an invisible DIV, measure how many letters it has on the target display, find the time to render the line (if the text shows at 2 chars/sec, 20 chars takes 10 seconds to render), measure how wide the element is with the 20 chars, and then make it a DIV where the text within it is left-justified, and the DIV's left margin shrinks at a constant rate per animation frame.