I'm currently writing an eBook reader for Windows Phone Seven, and I'm trying to style it like the Kindle reader. In order to do so, I need to split my books up into pages, and this is going to get a lot more complex when variable font sizes are added.
To do this at the moment, I just add a word at a time into the textblock until it becomes higher than its container. As you can imagine though, with a document of over 120,000 words, this takes an unacceptable period of time.
Is there a way I can find out when the text would exceed the bounds (logically dividing it into pages), without having to actually render it? That way I'd be able to run it in a background thread so the user can keep reading in the meantime.
So far, the only idea that has occurred to me is to find out how the textblock decides its bounds (in the measure call?), but I have no idea how to find that code, because reflector didn't show anything.
Thanks in advance!
I do something similar to adjust font size for individual textboxes (to ensure they all fit). Basically, I create a TextBlock in code, set all my properties and check the ActualWidth and ActualHeight properties. Here is some pseudo code to help with your problem:
public static String PageText(TextBlock txtPage, String BookText)
{
TextBlock t = new TextBlock();
t.FontFamily = txtPage.FontFamily;
t.FontStyle = txtPage.FontStyle;
t.FontWeight = txtPage.FontWeight;
t.FontSize = txtPage.FontSize;
t.Text = BookText;
Size Actual = new Size();
Actual.Width = t.ActualWidth;
Actual.Height = t.ActualHeight;
if(Actual.Height <= txtPage.ActualHeight)
return BookText;
Double hRatio = txtPage.ActualHeight / Actual.Height;
return s.Substring((int)((s.Length - 1) * hRatio));
}
The above is untested code, but hopefully can get you started. Basically it sees if the text can fit in the box, if so you're good to go. If not, it finds out what percentage of the text can fit and returns it. This does not take word breaks into account, and may not be a perfect match, but should get you close.
You could alter this code to return the length rather than the actual substring and use that as your page size. Creating the textblock in code (with no display) actually performs pretty well (I do it in some table views with no noticeable lag). I wouldn't send all 120,000 words to this function, but a reasonable subset of some sort.
Once you have the ideal length you can use a RegEx to split the book into pages. There are examples on this site of RegEx that break on word boundaries after a specific length.
Another option, is to calculate page size ahead of time for each potential fontsize (and hardcode it with a switch statement). This could easily get crazy if you are allowing any font and any size combinations, and would be awful if you allowed mixed fonts/sizes, but would perform very well. Most likely you have a particular range of readable sizes, and just a few fonts. Creating a test app to calculate the text length of a page for each of these combinations wouldn't be that hard and would probably make your life easier - even if it doesn't "feel" right as a programmer :)