I have a problem with character spacing.
Basically I have something like this which comes from a txt file:
****************
*System Details*
****************
Looks nice and uniform, however, when I open have this go into a RichTextBox this happens:
Irregular character spacing example:
I've tried all different properties to try and stretch it, render it etc. but nothing works.
The data is coming in from code-behind OpenDialogBox that stores all the lines of the file in a string[]. A foreach loop then sends the lines into the RTB. (It needs to be a loop as each line gets checked)
Any help it greatly appreciated!
Many thanks
This is most likely a font choice problem. By default WPF uses Segoe UI on Windows 7 and above which is a non-monospaced font. This means that each character will not necessarily take up the same amount of space as each other character leading to issues if you are trying to align characters between lines. The easiest way to get alignment to work is by changing the font to a monospaced font by setting the FontFamily property on the RichTextBox.
I have a RichTextBox in a WPF application that serves as an output container for status updates. Each line added is colored based on it's informational level (warning-yellow, info-gray and so on).
Paragraph currentStatus = new Paragraph(new Run("ERROR: Couldn't find stuffs."));
currentStatus.Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Red;
List myList = new List();
myList.ListItems.Add(new ListItem(currentStatus));
rtbStatus.Document.Blocks.Add(myList); // existing rich textbox
Though it is technically working, after hours of digging I still have a few formatting problems I can't seem to over-come or research out:
I want the list to be inverted, with the most recent 'post' at the top. I have been able to achieve this a couple of different ways, but each at a cost of losing the previous color formatting to the default foreground color of the control (the app has a visual buffer of about 10 lines when spacing is ideal that needs to retain the color applied).
I want the line spacing to be normal, w/o padding between lines. There is enough room for almost 2 more lines between each 'post' when using a list and I am looking for something resembling a textblock's multi-line spacing (see screen linkage below).
I'd love to get rid of the bullet points if a list is the way to go.
A couple notes: This all has to be done on the back-end, and I would like to look at a smooth auto-scrolling animation as a future feature release, though I haven't researched it yet (off-thread topic).
Now, everything I am reading leads me to believe a richTextBox>flowDocument>list is my best solution as I couldn't figure out how leverage the AppendText() method with a line break (environment.NewLine works, but has an even greater amount of padding between lines) nor work out the color dynamics when using other controls, but I am a novice in the C# world.
Please tell me if I am doing this the hard way first and foremost. But if anyone has ideas on how to achieve the above it'd be greatly appreciated.
Image of the above syntax:
Image of the desired spacing results using textblock:
Thanks in advance.
I found some properties that allowed me to accomplish this, so I removed the list and after some tweaking came up with the below:
// Status Update
public void UpdateStatus(string eventLevel, string message)
{
Paragraph currentStatus = new Paragraph(new Run(message));
if (eventLevel == "info")
currentStatus.Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Gray;
if (eventLevel == "warning")
currentStatus.Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Yellow;
if (eventLevel == "error")
currentStatus.Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.Red;
if (eventLevel == "highlight")
currentStatus.Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Brushes.CornflowerBlue;
currentStatus.LineHeight = 1;
rtbStatus.Document.Blocks.InsertBefore(rtbStatus.Document.Blocks.FirstBlock, currentStatus);
}
and can now append colored lines to the 'top' with a minimal line space:
UpdateStatus("error", "My custom error message");
I'm using the .net chart control. I'd like to allocate some space at the bottom of the chart to add some additional information (date, associated file name, note, etc.) - about 0 to 4 lines in total. To do this I'd like to allocate some reserved space below the X axis title (the 0 to 4 lines worth) and use an annotation anchored to the bottom to contain the additional information. Or, if there's some other way to accomplish the same thing, that would be great.
I've been working for a couple of days trying to accomplish this but have not found a "professional" way to do it. I am able to do it by adding several blank lines to the X axis label, but I'd like something a little better than that.
I am using a dock style of fill and allowing auto sizing. I've tried margins and padding with no success. Annotations appear to simply overlay existing area on the chart but do not allocate any additional space.
I'm looking to allocate a fixed size block at the bottom since the text block will be a fixed size height, rather than a percentage (relative coordinates).
Does anyone have any suggestions that I might try? Thanks!
I found a way to accomplish what I was looking to do. I simply used a chart Title and docked it to the bottom of the chart. It allows me to add in the extra data that I wanted to add and space is properly allocated for it. I'm new to using MSCharts and hadn't noticed that I could use multiple titles docked to different places on the chart.
I'm having a little problem, i have Custom list box item, that is 165 px height. So, the text block wraps text and gets 50% height of the list box item, example:
How you noticed the text size is too big.
Is there a way to make fint size exatly big to fit in the textblock?
As far as my understanding it can be done with help of textBox.Text.Length property. Also It depends on the font you are using.
What happens when the Text is 10000 characters long? Rather than trying to show all of the text you should make the font smaller (no need for something that large) and use TextTrimming. TextTrimming will cut the text short and put an ellipse at the end.
<TextBlock Text="{Binding MyProperty}" TextTrimming="WordEllipsis" />
System.Windows.Forms.TextRenderer.DrawText method renders formatted text with or without left and right padding depending on the value of the flags parameter:
TextFormatFlags.NoPadding - fits the text tightly into the bounding box,
TextFormatFlags.GlyphOverhangPadding - adds some left and right margins,
TextFormatFlags.LeftAndRightPadding - adds even bigger margins.
Now, my question is how can I get the exact amount of padding (left and right) added by DrawText to the text for a given device context, string, font etc?
I've dug into .NET 4 with .NET Reflector and found that TextRenderer calculates "overhang padding" which is 1/6 of the font's height and then multiplies this value to calculate left and right margins using these coefficients:
left 1.0, right 1.5 for TextFormatFlags.GlyphOverhangPadding,
left 2.0, right 2.5 for TextFormatFlags.LeftAndRightPadding.
The resulting values are rounded up and passed to the DrawTextExA or DrawTextExW native API functions. It's difficult to recreate this process because font's height is taken not from System.Drawing.Font but from System.Windows.Forms.Internal.WindowsFont and these classes return different values for the same font. And a lot of other internal BCL classes from the System.Windows.Forms.Internal namespace are involved. Decompiling all of them and reusing their code in my app is not an option, because that would be a serious .NET implementation dependency. That's why I need to know if there is some public API in WinForms or at least which Windows functions I can use to get the values of left and right margins.
Note: I've tried to TextRenderer.MeasureText with and without padding and compare the results but that gave me only the sum of left and right margins and I need them separately.
Note 2: In case you wonder why I need this: I want to draw one string with multiple fonts/colors. That involves calling DrawText once for every uniformly formatted substring with NoPadding option (so that the text doesn't spread) but I also want to add manually normal GlyphOverhangPadding at the very beginning and very end of the whole multi-format text.
The value you need for computing left and right margins is TEXTMETRIC.tmHeight, which is possible to obtain using Win32 API.
However, I found that tmHeight is just a line height of a font in pixels, so these three approaches will give you the same value (you can use whichever you like in your code):
int apiHeight = GetTextMetrics(graphics, font).tmHeight;
int gdiHeight = TextRenderer.MeasureString(...).Height;
int gdipHeight = (int)Math.Ceiling(font.GetHeight(graphics));
To obtain left and right margins, we use the same code as TextRenderer does under the hood:
private const float ItalicPaddingFactor = 0.5f;
...
float overhangPadding = (gdiHeight / 6.0f);
//NOTE: proper margins for TextFormatFlags.LeftAndRightPadding flag
//int leftMargin = (int)Math.Ceiling(overhangPadding);
//int rightMargin = (int)Math.Ceiling(overhangPadding * (2 + ItalicPaddingFactor));
//NOTE: proper margins for TextFormatFlags.GlyphOverhangPadding flag
int leftMargin = (int)Math.Ceiling(overhangPadding);
int rightMargin = (int)Math.Ceiling(overhangPadding * (1 + ItalicPaddingFactor));
Size sizeOverhangPadding = TextRenderer.MeasureText(e.Graphics, "ABC", font, Size.Empty, TextFormatFlags.GlyphOverhangPadding);
Size sizeNoPadding = TextRenderer.MeasureText(e.Graphics, "ABC", font, Size.Empty, TextFormatFlags.NoPadding);
int overallPadding = (sizeOverhangPadding.Width - sizeNoPadding.Width);
Now you can easily check that
(leftMargin + rightMargin) == overallPadding
Just to note:
I needed to solve this problem in order to implement "Search Highlight" feature in a ListView-based control that uses GDI text rendering:
Works like a charm :)
This answer is an excerpt from here - http://www.techyv.com/questions/how-get-exact-text-margins-used-textrenderer#comment-35164
If you have ever wanted a Label or TextBox in Windows Forms that performs a little more like on the web, then you've probably figured out that there's no intuitive way to make a Label or TextBox automatically adjust its height to fit the text it contains. While it may not be intuitive, it's definitely not impossible.
In this example, I'll use a TextBox (you could just as easily use a Label) that is docked to the top of a form.To use this, add aTextBox called MyTextBox to the form, and set Dock to DockStyle.Top. Wire up the Resize event of the TextBox to this event handler.
private void MyTextBox_Resize( object sender, EventArgs e )
{
// Grab a reference to the TextBox
TextBox tb = sender as TextBox;
// Figure out how much space is used for borders, etc.
int chromeHeight = tb.Height - tb.ClientSize.Height;
// Create a proposed size that is very tall, but exact in width.
Size proposedSize = new Size( tb.ClientSize.Width, int.MaxValue );
// Measure the text using the TextRenderer
Size textSize = TextRenderer.MeasureText( tb.Text, tb.Font,
proposedSize, TextFormatFlags.TextBoxControl
| TextFormatFlags.WordBreak );
// Adjust the height to include the text height, chrome height,
// and vertical margin
tb.Height = chromeHeight + textSize.Height
+ tb.Margin.Vertical;
}
If you want to resize the a Label or TextBox that is not docked (for example, one that is in a FlowLayoutPanel or other Panel, or just placed on the form), then you can handle the Form's Resize even instead, and just modify the Control's properties directly.
This might seem (very) crude, but this is the only native implementation I can think of:
DrawText draws to an IDeviceContext, which is implemented by Graphics. Now, we can take advantage of that with the following code:
Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(....);
Graphics graphic = Graphics.FromImage(bmp);
textRenderer.DrawText(graphic,....);
graphic.Dispose();
With the new Bitmap you can go pixel by pixel and count them by some condition.
Again, this method is very crude and wasteful, but at least it's native....
This is not tested but based on the following sources:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4ftkekek.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.idevicecontext.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.graphics.aspx
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/graphics-bitmap-t1399954.html
I've done something similar a few years ago, to highlight search results (search pattern appears in bold etc.). My implementation was in DevExpress, so the code might not be relevant. If you think it's of use I can copy it, just need to find that implementation.
In System.Windows.Forms, the class to use would be Graphics. It has a MeasureCharacterRanges() method which accepts a StringFormat (start with GenericTypographic and go from there). It is much more appropriate than TextRenderer for displaying a complete string by chaining parts with different styles, fonts or brushes.
You've gone way further than me with the actual padding measuring. DevExpress's controls gave you the text bounding rectangle to start with so that was done for me.
Here's an article by Pierre Arnaud that came up for me in Google, which touches on this area. Unfortunately the GDI+ "Gory details" link there is broken.
Cheers,
Jonno
The fix is to calculate what MeasureText is going to add:
var formatFlags FormatFlags =
TextFormatFlags.NoPadding |
TextFormatFlags.SingleLine;
int largeWidth = TextRenderer.MeasureText(
" ",
font,
new Size(int.MaxValue, int.MaxValue),
formatFlags
).Width;
int smallWidth = TextRenderer.MeasureText(
" ",
font,
new Size(int.MaxValue, int.MaxValue),
formatFlags
).Width;
int extra = smallWidth - (largeWidth - smallWidth);
We calculate the width of one space and the width of two spaces. Both have the extra width added, so we can extrapolate the extra width that is being added. The added width apparently is always the same, so subtracting extra from every width returned by MeasureText gives the expected results.