Jumping to a new line. Is there a command to put in the middle of the text?

[Woody_FX]

I am using my own menu but was using an Alert to display all the help info i.e. the rules.

But the Alert doesn’t look like the Main menu so it looks out of place so I have an idea to create my own canvas based help screen.

What I was wondering is there a way to write a few lines of text to the screen without using say 10 drawstrings to do each new line.

I would like to have my test like this

g.drawString("Controls /newline
 2 = Up /newline
 8 = Down / newline
 4 = Left /newline
 6 = Right / newline
 Keep the ball on the / newline 
 court and hit the  / newline
 targets for bonuses", screenCenter,17, g.TOP | g.HCENTER);

I would like to be able to specify when to go to a new line?
Is there a little command or something for this?

Thanks
B

[grahamhughes]

No, I'm afraid you need to write each line to the right place. You could do something like:

String [] asHelpText = {
    "Controls", "2 = up", "and so on"
};

// g is the Graphics context passed to paint()

int nFontHeight = g.getFont ().getHeight ();

for (int i = 0; i < asHelpText.length; i ++) {
    g.drawString (asHelpText [i], 0, i * nFontHeight, Graphics.TOP | Graphics.LEFT);
}

This assumes that each line is short enough to fit in the screen, and that there are few enough lines to fit without scrolling. If you only need to support one phone and the text will fit, you're OK. Otherwise, you'll need to write code to handle word wrapping to the screen width, and scrolling if you run out of screen.

One alternative is to use a Form, and append StringItem objects to it. Most phones will handle word wrapping and scrolling automatically this way.

Graham.

[Woody_FX]

That is such a pity!

Graham how do you handle displaying help?

I was really hoping there was away to format this kind of thing.
I saw somewhere somebody using something like /n but cant find it anymore.

Might just stay using an alert though it just does'nt fit in as well with the colour of the menu.

No!! i'm going to give your way a lash.... its early yet and i've very little else do be doing tonight.

Thanks
B

[shmoove]

And of course this might help you out. You could use it in a loop instead of putting the lines in an array, just draw substrings with the positions it gives you (notice that it also outputs linebreaks with '\n').

shmoove