Re: Printing page breaks in an attributed string?

FROM : Douglas Davidson
DATE : Mon Jun 05 18:16:34 2006

On Jun 4, 2006, at 7:17 PM, Joshua Scott Emmons wrote:

>> Take a look at TextEdit's MultiplePageView. You can insert a 
>> formfeed (\f) character into it and it will cause a page break.
>>

>
> While, empirically, I know this is true (as I've inserted a form 
> feed and seen the page break) I, for the life of me, cannot figure 
> out how this is accomplished. It certainly doesn't happen in in 
> MutiplePageView. That only maps rects to already existing text 
> views, near as I can tell. I don't see any processing that looks 
> for formfeed and creates a new "page" (in this case, a text view) 
> for it.
>
> Is this done automatically by the layout manager? Reading between 
> the lines of the TextEdit example makes me think that it might be 
> the case that, if presented with multiple containers that it must 
> flow text for, the layout manager might interpret a \f as a sign to 
> "skip to the next container". I can't find any documentation on 
> this, though. Can anyone confirm that's what's supposed to happen?
>


It is the typesetter that interprets form feeds, but yes, that is 
what happens.  There is one notable exception--if the current 
container is very long, long enough that the typesetter considers it 
to be effectively infinitely long, then form feeds are ignored.  The 
default size for a text container is of this sort; thus, for example, 
form feeds are ignored when TextEdit is not in wrap to page mode.

Douglas Davidson