splitting a long string into multiple strings

[reven]

anyone know how to take a string that wouldnt be able to fit in a rectangle and would require an extra page and split it at the exact point where it no longer fits and then draw that string on another page?

im trying to take the actors bio and split it into multiple pages so the user can press page down/up to go through the pages. but i have no idea how to do this, anyone have experience with this, or know where i might begin?

[KingArgyle]

Figure out roughly how many characters can fit on the rectangle (including spaces), and then use the substring method to extract out the number of characters that you can display. Keep track of the last position you extracted from and then use that if you have even more text to display.

You'll also want to take in the variable aspect of the width being different and not always a fixed size. So if you can figure out how many characters fit in the largest rectangle, you can then use an algorithim to dynamically adjust the number of characters based on the width or height of the rectangle.

MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library....pic.asp

[jrockintuitive]

Let me provide you with another alternative.

Instead of page up and page down you can provide a scroll.

I don't know how to do this in C# (yet) but in C++ this is how I would do this:
Create an window or a bitmap to the size you want
Draw the text on the bitmap or form.
when the user scrolls up the rect.top that you use to draw the text would be a negative number. The bitmap or form never moves.

The idea here is that you draw the entire string in a box and the bitmap or form will cut the text on the top and bottom approprialtly... thus the illusion of a text box and scroll effect.

If you want me to try this in C#, let me know

[reven]

jrockintuitive that probably sounds like the best solution, KingArgyle its a little to much of guess work, could be errors in that, text cut off etc (i was originally going to try something like this). jrockintuitive can try and see if you can get it working in c# and let me know how you get on? thanks guys for the help.

[KingArgyle]

Yeah, my way is a bit more coding, but also a little more memory efficient. But since you are dealing with a graphics envirnoment anyway, Jrocks way is probably the best way to go.

[reven]

theres just an issue with the character size, if you take the average, what if there are 50 "i"s on a line or 50 "w"'s;sure would probably never happen but:
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

see, big difference.

[KingArgyle]

Not if you use a Monospaced font.

[reven]

yeah i was also thinking of doing that

[KingArgyle]

Here is something that was done in MFC using C++ that you might be able to adapt. Again, probably more complicated then you really want so sometimes the XP (Extreme Programming) way is the way to go (the simplest method).

http://groups-beta.google.com/group....89b2065

[jasonf]

Check out the source for the scrolling textbox widget control.  You can see how I handled the overflow of text and scrollbars, which is basically by rendering all of the text to a bitmap, and then showing only a windowed section of that bitmap in the control (window=size of control):

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs....=markup

Which also uses the vscrollbar:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs....=markup

and hscrollbars:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs....=markup