In 2.0, assuming <font> is the context node, I think the most direct
translation of your requirement is

.//text()[. >> current()/br[1] and . << current()/a[last()]]

Note that this gives you a sequence of text nodes, if you want to turn this
into a string, use string-join(). Remember to escape < with &lt;

But I do wonder how general-purpose this is; are there lots of instances
like this, and do they vary much?

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/