Javascript :: TinyMCE Limit Text On ScrollerActived?

I have a textarea in my rails application to collect content from user in a database. The rails application is further feeding that text to an XML-driven flex application.The flex application has number of fixed sized containers which wraps the text inside (from the XML created by Rails app on-the-fly), but truncates the text if it exceeds the container's height. Problem is; there is no way to present the large text in XML, so it gets adjusted automatically in the compiled flex application. And the fact is; the web-based rails app and front-tier flex app are entirely disconnected in terms of having awareness of their internal events. (like in this case; rails app has no knowledge of the overflow event for flex internal containers and relying on font-size and character/line count doesn't work in this scenario!)

Therefore, I wrote a JS function to watch and rescue the textarea's overflow situation and while setting its attributes (viz; line-height, font-size, font-family, width, height... yada yada) matching that of the flex control. The complex form in rails did the trick to have dynamic number of such textarea's control being observed by the JS function.Here is the Prototype code to handle the overflow event with the corresponding rescue code for cleanup:

var timeout;
document.observe('dom:loaded', attach_obr);
function attach_obr() {
$$('.active_text').each (function(text_element){

[code]....

Is there a way to get the scrollHeight and offsetHeight of the control created by tinyMCE?Is there a way to get the only-text version (without markup) of inner content of tinyMCE control?(So, when I truncate the text in check_limits function, it doesn't effect/breaks the markup/DOM created by tinyMCE for the formatted text. In other words, I would be simulating the user action of pressing backspace on tinyMCE control in the while loop.)