Scaling an mx:Text – The Bottom Line…

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Have a look at my little test app here.

On the numeric stepper, keep increasing the scaling.

You’ll find at about 1.26, a strange thing happens – you lose the bottom line.

As usual in my adventures with the Flex SDK, it’s a bug.  But this time I don’t think it’s a bug in the Flex SDK.   I believe it is in the text control in Flash Player.

Anyway, there is a bug report, and it’s here: SDK-16876.

If you encounter this issue with showing controls on the screen, you can probably get around it by setting an explicit height on the Text control.  However, what happens if you want the Text control to grow it’s height?  Setting an explicit height simply isn’t going to work if you don’t know at runtime if the Text control will hold 2 lines or 20.

But there is another sting in the tail of this particular bug.  You may be able to work around this issue on the screen by either sizing components or not scaling them.  But there is one time where you will have to use scaling…..

Printing.

And that’s where I hit this problem.  I can’t use any of the existing solutions in my app because I need the Text control to grow to show all it’s text, and I need to print that Text component, so it needs to scale properly.

My test app uses a copy of the Text component, and I have updated it a bit.   I have added a new function:

private function getCalculatedTextHeight():Number
{
    var textHeight:Number = 0;

    for(var i:int=0; i < textField.numLines; i++)
    {
        textHeight += textField.getLineMetrics(i).height;
    }

    // SDK-16876
    // Comment in this line instead of the following one
    // to fix the issue.
    // return Math.ceil(textHeight) + 4;
    return Math.ceil(textHeight);
}

It seems that there is a rounding error somewhere, because if you add 4 to the height returned by getCalculatedTextHeight(), the problem goes away. The downside is that Text controls appear a bit larger in height, but the major plus side is that all the lines in my Text controls now get printed.

I thank you.

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