Symphony.

Well after playing with other solutions to this problem, I wrote my own. Grab the gist here.

Basically it takes the data you send it and returns everything up to your chosen character limit. It will preserve HTML and also allows you to pass in text to be used in a 'more' link at the end of the truncate.

Please feel free to tell me how it can be improved, as this is my first XSLT utility.