how to break a long text to multiple lines in PDF creation in android?

Question

I have a notebook app and i want to have the notes to be saved as PDF files. the user can write long texts in TextView but when i get the text to string and create a PDF file, only a small part of the text in a single line will be in the PDF file. how can i break the text to multiple lines to see entire text in PDF page? i used this part of java codes to break the text but it does not work.

     textView = findViewById(R.id.textView);

     String pdfText = textView.getText().toString();

     Paint contentPaint = new Paint();
        int length = pdfText.length();
        contentPaint.breakText(pdfText, 0, length, true, 70, null);
        canvas.drawText(pdfText, 30, 285, contentPaint);

While this solves the problem of multiline using StaticLayout but if the text size is very long and requires multi pages then please [check my answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/71394812/12552434) where I have explained with sample code how to handle it. https://stackoverflow.com/a/71394812/12552434 — abby, Mar 08 '22 at 12:17

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '21 at 15:54

I had the same problem. I managed to solve it from this post. it uses static layout. Below is my whole code which saves a string value to a pdf file created with multiline breaks.

String saveFilePath = path.getPath();
String textToSave = detectedText.getText().toString();
File file = new File(path, filenameString + ".pdf");
file.createNewFile();
FileOutputStream fOut = new FileOutputStream(file);
PdfDocument document = new PdfDocument();
PdfDocument.PageInfo pageInfo = new PdfDocument.PageInfo.Builder(595, 842, 1).create();
PdfDocument.Page page = document.startPage(pageInfo);
Canvas canvas = page.getCanvas();

//*this part i took from the post for multiline breaks*
TextPaint mTextPaint = new TextPaint();
StaticLayout mTextLayout = new StaticLayout( textToSave ,mTextPaint, canvas.getWidth() - 100, Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_NORMAL, 1.0f, 0.0f, false);
canvas.save();
int textX = 50;
int textY = 50;
canvas.translate(textX, textY);
//**

mTextLayout.draw(canvas);
canvas.restore();
document.finishPage(page);
document.writeTo(fOut);
document.close();

If your string is still overflowing the page, try different values here

canvas.getWidth() - 100

in StaticLayout initialization. I will provide some before and after screenshots.

before multiline breaks

after multiline breaks

If the text is very long it should create next page in pdf but with the above code it overflows below, any idea how to resolve this? — abby, Mar 06 '22 at 02:41

how to break a long text to multiple lines in PDF creation in android?

1 Answers1