While not perfect, you could flag the field to stretch with overflow. This would at least give you all the data. In your jrxml file it would be similar to:
<textField isStretchWithOverflow="true" hyperlinkType="None">
<reportElement style="Report Sub-Title" x="0" y="84" width="802" height="20"/>
<textElement/>
<textFieldExpression class="java.lang.String">
<![CDATA["For the period ...]]>
</textFieldExpression>
</textField>
I’m afraid I don’t know of any feature of Jasper reports that would allow the dynamic resizing of column widths – It is probably one of those things that makes sense for HTML but little sense for other output formats such as PDF.