Paged Results Set in MySQL DB with one result

Greetings Gents, I have an interesting problem I would like some ideas on for a solution. I cannot seem to find any code examples on the net, though I might not be looking in the right place really. I have some articles stored in a MySQL DB. What I want is if the article is above a certain length in characters, to page article through a few pages for site readability. So I would want to print X number of words/characters. Save the where the pointer is, move on to the next page, and display the same amount and so on for as many pages as needed. I know about pulling paged results using the limit function but that would not seem to apply as really I would want to page the results within one record (one field really). Does anyone have any ideas?? Thanks Phillip