I have a that needs to fit into a space whose size is not pre-determined (is a percentage of the screen size). I can get good results if FireFo
There may be a sneaky CSS way to achieve this that I don't know about, but in my experience this is one of the things where using a bit of Javascript is justified.
You could get the height you need (of the current window I presume) using JQuery or Prototype, or in pure Javascript: Get the height of the current document and then
document.getElementById("text_area").style.height = calculated_height+"px";
The left hand padding I find odd, though. Can you post an example?