Fit To Box and Determine if Doesn't Fit In Box

Question

I hope the subject line says it all.
First step - how can I determine if the TexFlow that needs to get rendered fits into the target area? Is there a boolean of some sort or do i have to check the overflow length?
Once I've done that is there any easy method to get the content that did not fit?
More complex - is there a way to force the flow to fit within a container by some means? Or is this too complicated of a situation requring iterating through all flows and resizing, adjusting leading/tracking, etc. until it fits?
thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

It depends a little on how you have set up the container. For your purposes, it might be easiest to turn scrolling off. You can do this by setting the ContainerController's verticalScrollPolicy and horizontalScrollPolicy to "off". Once you have done this, and forced a recompose (you can do this by calling the flowComposer's updateAllControllers() method), then you can see how much text fit into the container by looking at the container's textLength property. If controller.absoluteStart + controller.textLength < textFlow.textLength, then there was more text than fit in the container, and you have overset text.
This will also, by the way, tell you exactly which text did not fit, and how much there is, which is very useful if you intend to do any copyfitting. So, the text that didn't fit is the text starting at controller.absoluteStart + controller.textLength and going up to the end of the TextFlow (textFlow.textLength).
Forcing the flow to fit is more complex. There are some simple truncation methods that work on the TextLineFactory classes to remove text. You can define how many lines you want, etc. If you want to be able to see the whole text, then it gets more complicated. In that case, you may need to do some osrt of iterative process where you apply things such as scaling the text, applying tracking, etc. according some algorithm that gets reasonable results for what you're trying to do. In this case, I would suggest using the FlowComposer's compose methods to force composition up to date, then see how much text fits at each stage before applying the next transformation. That will look better and be slightly faster than calling updateAllContainers each time.
Hope this helps,
- robin