Printing page breaks in an attributed string?

FROM : Joshua Scott Emmons
DATE : Sun Jun 04 23:53:42 2006

I have a multi-page attributed string that I need to print in my 
application. For the most part, this is very straight forward. I have 
an NSView subclass that sets up a large NSTextView inside of it with 
the proper origin and width. The text view is set to expand 
vertically, so I just add my string to it, it makes itself the right 
size, I set my NSView to that size, and we print. Nice and simple!

The problem is that my attributed string can contain page breaks 
(that is, a characters that, when encountered, should make the very 
next part of the string appear at the top of the next logical page). 
NSTextView does not seem to handle page breaks automagically, so I've 
been looking to make my own solution.

First I thought -[NSView adjustPageHeightNew:top:bottom:limit:] was 
going to solve my problems. But because of the heightAdjustlimit, it 
only lets me break pages that have the page-break character in the 
bottom limit% of the page. So that won't work.

Then I thought I'd just lay out multiple NSTextViews in my view, one 
for each page break, and  make sure that each one's origin had a y 
value that's a multiple of the page height. This works well unless 
one of the pages before is long enough to be broken on to multiple 
pages. If that happens, the total size of that NSTextView gets 
adjusted by NSTextView's implementation of -adjustPageHeightNew:... 
so that lines of text don't get cut in half. But that means one 
page's view can unpredictably overlap another's if there are enough 
of these adjustments.

So that leaves me with rolling my own custom pagination scheme. But 
that seems a lot of work to support something as simple as page 
breaks in an otherwise plain vanilla attributed string. Am I over-
thinking this and missing something obvious? Does any one know of 
examples that touch on this?

Many thanks!
-Joshua Emmons