formatted text, php and mysql

Hi, hopefully someone can help me out with this.. I need to be able to copy text from a document, keeping carriage returns and white space chars, into a database and output the same to a web page. I have a field in a mysql table of type 'longtext' into which i can load text and keep the white space and carriage return characters intact. I can output this field to a page using php in a similarly formatted way by using the <pre> tag in an echo statemnet : - echo "<tr><pre>$content</pre></tr>"; however, by using the <pre> tag all individual lines of text are printed on a single line and the sizing of my table is ignored, i.e. the text won't wrap. <pre width=20> for example doesn't work. Is there a 'proper' way of doing something like this with php without relying on printing out html tags with the string? cheers Dan