So the plan here, was to layout and associate data using d3, then use impress.js to create a moving slideshow over that layout.
Ended up using those two, and packer.js, which enabled efficient packing of the text into a more local space.
See a demo using loreum ipsum here: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/arrghh1/AutoTextSlideShow/blob/master/testImpress2.html