//TEXTRECTANGLE, left, top, right, bottom

bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bling

bla bla bla bla bla bla

//TEXTRECTANGLE

TEXTRECTANGLE is similar to the TEXTINDENT command, both in what it is used for and also in the fact that it consists of a starting and ending command (the ending command has no arguments), with any number of lines of text in between the two.

TEXTRECTANGLE formats the text (up to the ending //TEXTRECTANGLE) to fit within the rectangular coordinates provided, applying word wrap to the lines as needed. Note that any existing CRLF line terminators will be respected; in the example above, the word "bling" will mark the end of a line, no matter how the rest of it formats.

If the text does not all fit in the rectangle, the last word will be printed with an ellipsis (...) following it. See MX_GDICALC in the A-Shell XCALL Reference for information on calculating in advance how much text will fit.

Some text rotation options are also supported; see History below.

See the SOSLIB program MMOGDI for an example.

//TEXTRECTANGLE, left, top, right, bottom, flags, text

This variation (identified by the six parameters) is both simpler to use than the traditional multi-part TEXTRECTANGLE sequence, and offers some additional features such as multi-line horizontal and vertical centering.

flags may be any sensible combination of the following:

Flag	Value	Meaning
TRF_TOP	&h00000000	top justification
TRF_LEFT	&h00000000	left justification
TRF_HCENTER	&h00000001	horizontal centering
TRF_RIGHT	&h00000002	right justification
TRF_VCENTER	&h00000004	vertical centering
TRF_BOTTOM	&h00000008	bottom justification
TRF_WORDBREAK	&h00000010	wrap the text onto multiple lines
TRF_SINGLELINE	&h00000020	output text as a single line
TRF_EXPANDTABS	&h00000040	expand tabs (8 spaces each)
TRF_NOCLIP	&h00000100	no clipping
TRF_EXTERNALLEADING	&h00000200	incl. ext. leading in spacing
TRF_CALCRECT	&h00000400	calc only (use with MX_GDICALC)
TRF_PATH_ELLIPSIS	&h00004000	path ellipsis
TRF_END_ELLIPSIS	&h00008000	end ellipsis
TRF_WORD_ELLIPSIS	&h00040000	word ellipsis

 

As with other GDI printer directives, the flags can be specified as a decimal value, hex value, or using the symbol names.

text may be any string of up to 2048 characters. It may include "^M" symbol(s) to indicate hard CRLF(s).

2011 October, A-Shell 5.1.1235

//TEXTRECTANGLE now supports limited rotation options (TRF_SINGLELINE with 90, -90, or 180 degree rotation only). Note that the rectangle itself is not rotated, nor is the interpretation of the alignment options (TRF_LEFT, TRF_TOP, etc. remain relative to the rectangle in the standard orientation of the page. Only the text is rotated. See the new sample GDI text file, TEXTRECTR.TXT[908,37] for examples.

2011 August, A-Shell 5.1.1230: Added Syntax Two

2007 April, A-Shell build 986

Increased the maximum paragraph length supported by the //TEXTRECTANGLE command to 16K. This is considerably longer than can fit on a page, which is the effective limit for what a single //TEXTRECTANGLE can handle anyway. Larger paragraphs can still be analyzed by MX_GDICALC, it would inevitably break them up into rectangles (or entire pages) that were individually less than 16K (unless perhaps you used 2 point type in an effort to cram 16K of unreadable text on a page).

An error message box will be displayed if any single line of the printfile exceeds the 16K limit.

Note that neither MX_GDICALC nor //TEXTRECTANGLE support the line continuation character (\) so unless you want to insert your own line breaks, the entire paragraph has to be output as a single line (with the only CRLF being at the end).

2005 May, A-Shell build 986: Routine added to A-Shell