Basically, as David Carlisle said, you're going to need the construction
you said you don't want in order to get the first 1000 characters of the
node:

<xsl:value-of select="(substring(.,1,1000)"/>

And then you're going to have to use the other resources of xslt to avoid
getting the first 1000 characters of each node.

Such as:
<xsl:for-each> if you really want to do this for all the text nodes, only
not all at once
or
you can use select the 3rd occurence of a node if you know that is the one
you want
or
you can put more structure in your xml and select based on that

etcetera

Rick Suiter




 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list