Android :: Drawing Word-wrapped Text At Arbitrary Position On A Canvas

I believe I know the basics and have successfully published a nice graphical game (Tairu). I know about inflating an xml layout and instantiating views that work.

For my current project, I really just want something similar to the Windows 'DrawText' function where it will draw a bit of a text inside an arbitrary rectangle of the surface, and do word wrap within that rectangles boundaries. That's what I really WANT, but I can't find any form of drawText that will wrap.

So, while that's what I WANT, I can accept the thought of programmatically instantiating a TextView (which wraps beautifully). But I still need to be able to provide the rectangle, which is highly dynamic. (which is why I want to call a form of drawText inside of my onDraw method). In this particular case, I have something which is static to a particular view instance (I mean, the View becomes visible, the position is set, and does not change after that. but the text position is dependent on game state and cannot be pre-determined inside an XML layout). So in this one case, I could afford the expense of runtime recalculation of the layout when the view is displayed.

OK, fine. So I do something like this:

CODE:......

Pretend you didn't see 'AbsoluteLayout' there, I am desperate and have tried all possible layout classes

main_frame is defined in my main XML layout (it is the outermost layout, fills the parent, and, as I said, I've tried all the offered layouts)

With this code, the textView appears, but along the top of the layout, and not using the width I provided either.

Adding, out of desperation.

CODE:.......

makes no difference. In fact, so far, NOTHING has made any difference. So I thought, ok, while this seems like a useful thing to be able to do, I can accept if it can't. I accept that it is impossible to provide dimensions in advance and that you have to override the measure and layout callbacks then requestLayout and in your overrides, force the final layout for the TextView.

Of course, that is completely unacceptable for my FIRST desire (a drawText that wraps to a rectangle, called from onDraw as needed). But the point is I feel something like that OUGHT to work, and it doesn't, so clearly this is MY fault.

Getting back to what I WANT, I guess I can do it myself by repeated calls to measure text and parsing the string for spaces until I get the N characters which fit on the first line, then repeat for additional lines, calling a normal drawText for each line (and using textMetrics to determine the vertical offset to the next line.)

But why wouldn't that method already exist? I promise not to fill the screen with a zillion calls, and/or to cache pre-rendered text on some bitmap somewhere if antialiased drawText is too expensive to repeat frequently.