Forcing carriage returns when writing into a text field in director 7

Question

I am trying to put together a data table in a text field in
director 7. I have a 4 variables that contain random numbers. I
would like my data table to appear in the following format:
P1 xxx atm
V1 xxx mL
P2 xxx atm
V2 xxx mL
I was trying to do it into a single text field by
concatenating the text string for the variable name, the variable,
and also the variables containing the units. Unfortunately, the
different units are all different lengths, so I keep getting word
wrap issues. Is there anything I can do to just tell it to start a
new line?
My workaround was to put each line into a different field,
but .....
Any help would be appreciated.
BobR

Answer 1

This is actually fairly simple when working with numbers,
because numbers
(in most fonts) are fixed-width. X number of digits will take
up Y amount
of space, regardless of what those digits are. Thus, if you
figure out the
maximum number of digits that will fit into your column, you
can count the
digits of your random number to see if it'll fit, and then
add RETURNs in it
if it won't. Another thing you can do if it fits your style
is pad the
numbers with leading 0's. _'s are also usually the same width
as numbers.
At any rate, it's a little hard to help if we don't have a
good idea of what
kind of data you're trying to display - what's the range of
numbers, for
example? If you know about how many digits you'll have in
your longest
numbers, you should be able to tailor your text member to be
able to fit
that many digits without wrapping, just by typing in 12345678
or however
many digits you need and stretching things to fit that. It
gets a good deal
trickier with letters, unfortunately - "woman" takes up more
space than
"illicit" despite containing 2 fewer letters. There's ways of
dealing with
that, but they're not easy...