How to add ellipses to text StaticLayout when it exceeds its height?

Question

I'm programmatically creating StaticLayouts with varying strings, and then applying each to a bitmap that is then added to a canvas. The SL displays up to two lines before getting cut off by the fixed height that I defined in the SL constructor. But there is no ellipses to indicate that the text is longer than what is shown.

From http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/StaticLayout.html I see that the third constructor has truncation arguments at the end:

StaticLayout(CharSequence source, int bufstart, int bufend, TextPaint paint, int outerwidth, Layout.Alignment align, float spacingmult, float spacingadd, boolean includepad, TextUtils.TruncateAt ellipsize, int ellipsizedWidth)

I know I'd like TextUtils.TruncateAt.END, but I can't figure out what I should be defining for bufstart, bufend, and ellipsizedWidth. I couldn't find any good examples of this constructor in particular, or if it will even help achieve my goal.

Answer 1

Not 100% familiar with Android, but have had the same issue myself and this is what I've found:

• bufstart - index of the first character (in source) to include in the layout
• bufend - index of the last character to include in the layout
• outerwidth - I think the width of the imaginary box containing all your text (I've just made it really really wide)
• ellipsizedwidth - the width of your box your drawing into, text will be trimmed if it exceeds this

Sorry for a not-so-confident answer, but I'm still learning!