When you use the format tag, you have these options currently

xmod:Format
Type="Numeric|Float|Date|Text|RegEx|Cloak|HtmlEncode|HtmlDecode|UrlEncode|UrlDecode"
MaxLength="integer"

that you can use with the TEXT and MaxLength to make a short version of text show up. We often use it for the short intro on a bio or article text.

what would be supremely awesome is if we could use this on data that contains html content. At the moment there's no really good way to do a truncate and show the first 100 or 200 characters if it has mixed HTML content in the data.

it would be awesome if we had a smart truncate that would first strip out all tag code and give the first X characters of the remaining string