Pauljs75: You are a Genius!!! :)  

First a little about my attempt. before reading your post.

1. I created a text object and was able to put quite a bit of text in there.
2. I applied the wave modifier and got some terrible distortion to my text and thought
   I'm using the wrong modifier. 
3. So I applied the Linear Wave instead, but that was the wrong thing as well since the entire
   text got pre-waved so there was no animation at all. 

I read through the manual trying to understand the wave modifiers, and did play with the phase settings, but now looking at your method I realize the importance of setting the oscillation in the tweener.

Oh an one other thing to note.  I tried to network render my scroll text scene and I got weird artifacts on the actual text itself almost like Video Tearing.  I played around with the Network Render settings but it didnt make much of a difference.

I used a standard font, with standard metal shaders applied using one of the included 2 light systems.

I'll re-do everything using your method and display the results. :)