Draw multi-line text to Canvas

android android-canvas
Paul Mennega picture Paul Mennega · Jul 20, 2011 · Viewed 85.8k times · Source

A hopefully quick question, but I can't seem to find any examples... I'd like to write multi-line text to a custom View via a Canvas, and in onDraw() I have:

...
String text = "This is\nmulti-line\ntext";
canvas.drawText(text, 100, 100, mTextPaint);
...

I was hoping this would result in line breaks, but instead I am seeing cryptic characters where the \n would be.

Any pointers appreciated.

Paul

Answer

GreenBee picture GreenBee · Dec 3, 2011

I found another way using static layouts. The code is here for anyone to refer to:

TextPaint mTextPaint=new TextPaint();
StaticLayout mTextLayout = new StaticLayout(mText, mTextPaint, canvas.getWidth(), Alignment.ALIGN_NORMAL, 1.0f, 0.0f, false);

canvas.save();
// calculate x and y position where your text will be placed

textX = ...
textY = ...

canvas.translate(textX, textY);
mTextLayout.draw(canvas);
canvas.restore();

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