[Java-gnome-developer] Word wrap in a CellRenderText

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

Hey there,

I'm in the process of using a simple single-column ListStore backed
TreeView to display a summarized version of some data, and I'm having a
little trouble fine tuning the rendering - I need word wrap.

As some of you know, I'm working on something which, broadly stated,
involves displaying XML data. This particular window is a high level
summary, which simplifies navigation around the more specific details of
the document in other windows. As such, I've just read in selected XML
nodes, and composed a single string - with Pango markup - for display in
the TreeView widget.

Pango obviously provides for wrapping text in Labels; and likewise
TreeView (care of TreeViewColumn and CellRendererText.Attribute.MARKUP)
provides for displaying text with pango markup, so text of 

                This is <big>some huge</big> text, and <span
                size=small>this is small</span>

works. The trouble is that there's no markup code (that I can find) for
word wrap.

I looked up the GNOME manual, and Labels definitely have a wrap
property, and java-gnome lets you at it with Label.setLineWrap(true).
However, the text cells in a TreeView are not Labels, even though the
same pango engine is used to render them.

CellRendererText has a method called setAttributes(AttrList attr). That
seems to be the way to Pango, but when I look at the org.gnu.pango
classes, I can't figure out how to create the Attribute objects which it
uses.

Within org.gnu.pango there's a Layout class, which has
setWrapStyle(WrapMode.WORD), but I can't figure out how to get to
Attribute from Layout, or vice versa - for that matter, I can't figure
out what generates Layout objects.

So obviously I'm way off in left field here. If <span wrap="true">
worked, then this would be easy, but that doesn't work (and, in fact,
throws quite the error :)).

If I wasn't using a TreeView, then it would just be labels and would be
easy - but if I was forced to do that then it would mean trying to
manually duplicate the effect of the TreeView widget, and that's going
to be near impossible.

Help? :)

A small screenshot of what I'm fighting against is attached. The lines
in italics are all much longer, and the ones that need to be wrapped
instead of cut off.

AfC
Sydney


-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Managing Director

Sydney:   +61 2 9977 6866
New York: +1 646 472 5054
Toronto:  +1 416 848 6072
London:   +44 207 1019201

OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS
Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/