Ownerdrawn Label - Win2000 - Odd 'Feature'?

[Adam J. Drake]

I use the following code to draw multiline 'dot filled' labels:

DrawText @dis.hDC, szBuf, -1, tmprc, %DT_WORDBREAK OR %DT_END_ELLIPSIS OR %DT_LEFT OR %DT_NOPREFIX

Which seems to work to a certain point, up until the screen and font gets sized up a bit.

To get the 'dot filled' effect, I simply tack a bunch of periods on the end of the label caption, and use %DT_END_ELLIPSIS to cut it off and put '...' at the end.

This seems to be the only OS this happens on - is anyone aware of any sort of thing in Win2K that could cause this?

Picture of it working on XP:



Picture of what it looks like on 2K:



If anyone has any ideas/suggestions - any help would be much appreciated. I have no ideas...

[Fred Buffington]

Adam, this interests me because your example appears to be part of the 8867
page 3?

I just finished programming a pcl version to print of this.

[Adam J. Drake]

That it is...Only visual example I have...I will work on seeing if I can generate a failing code example in the next day or so - the actual code is just impossible to post here to test.

[Fred Buffington]

why not do it with graphic/xprint ? A few years ago, I did a 1120 (or 1120S) with input for the screen and pcl for output.
It would be similar to the 8867 although the 8867 is much simpler, mostly yes/no questions. That was before graphic/xprint
was included, so it was just with modal dialogs.

[Adam J. Drake]

Because of the complexity of the application and what it would take to change, and the possibility that changing over to a GRAPHIC control instead could slow things down (if I size it I have to kill and recreate the control), that unfortunately is not an option.

[Michael Mattias]

Because of the complexity of the application and what it would take to change, and the possibility that changing over to a GRAPHIC control instead could slow things down (if I size it I have to kill and recreate the control), that unfortunately is not an option

Gee, I wish I could know - without trying - that GRAPHIC will be slower.

How can I acquire that skill?

[Adam J. Drake]

Didn't say it will be - I said it is possible that it could slow things down...

[Nathan Maddox]

Was it just me...

or did the two pasted in examples have:
a)different sized fonts and
b)different fonts (one looked narrow the other more bold) and
c)different backgrounds

Could it be a "this font doesn't exist in Win2K so the 2nd guessing OS will substitute this font" kind of thing?

Seems I've heard of that in some printing applications. Maybe GUIs have the same pitfalls too?

[Adam J. Drake]

It wasn't just you.

One is a screen cap from XP - apparently the normal size. I can't find a size at which it fails in XP, just didn't pay attention to the fact that I hadn't sized the window up before I took the screen shot.

The other is a screen cap from 2K - the background color settings are just a little different between the two.

[Adam J. Drake]

I'm also finding that this isn't related to just ownerdrawn, I also see the effect in regular labels that are nothing more than multiple lines of text. It seems like in certain situations, extra line breaks are getting thrown into the mix for some unknown reason.

[Adam J. Drake]

If anyone is particularly curious about this one - I did find a resolution.

However, it is oh so odd. I discovered that the wrapping on each word was occurring even in non-ownerdrawn labels.

So, I made everything ownerdrawn to attempt to correct this, and draw each label by hand, multiline and the like, and found that GetTabbedTextExtent and GetTextExtentPoint32 both return a required width of 25,000+ pixels to draw a short line of text, in the situation that I was sizing the control up with the window on certain font sizes, then causing my code to fail too.

Oddly enough, a call to DrawText to do nothing but calculate the rectangle made those two functions return the correct values in Win2000, and the drawing code now works without a hiccup (so far as I can tell).

I am completely clueless as to how under certain circumstances, only in Windows 2000, the OS could think it needs 25 or so monitors worth of width to draw text.

[Michael Mattias]

GetTabbedTextExtent and GetTextExtentPoint32 both return a required width of 25,000+ pixels to draw a short line of text,

I've never had a problem with those functions on any O/S. Show failing code.

MCM