CSS - Background-color of overflow text from pre

[thing3b]

I currently have a PRE tag inside a DIV tag. The DIV tag has a limited size.
Often a long line of text will stretch outside the PRE tag. I do not mind this horisontal overflow as
the contents has more meaning when it is not wrapped.

My problem is that this overflow text flows under the right hand navigation column on my site. I would like the
PRE tag to be above everything else on my site. How can I do this?

The overflow text seems to have no background, making it hard to read if it is over an image.
Is there any way to get overflow text to have a brackground without expanding the PRE tag?

[penders]

Often a long line of text will stretch outside the PRE tag.

Do you mean it stretches outside of the DIV tag? I would have thought the PRE tag is being stretched?

If this is so, have you considered adding

overflow:auto

to your DIV container to make it scrollable? It won't then overflow outside of the container, but you can horizontally scroll to see the entire content.