Paginating text in Android

Solution 1:

NEW ANSWER

PagedTextView library (in Kotlin) summarises the below lying algorithm by extending Android TextView. The sample app demonstrates the usage of the library.

Setup

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.github.onikx:pagedtextview:0.1.3'
}

Usage

<com.onik.pagedtextview.PagedTextView
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent" />

OLD ANSWER

The algorithm below implements text pagination in separation of TextView itself lacking simultaneous dynamic change of both the TextView attributes and algorithm configuration parameters.

Background

What we know about text processing within TextView is that it properly breaks a text by lines according to the width of a view. Looking at the TextView's sources we can see that the text processing is done by the Layout class. So we can make use of the work the Layout class does for us and utilizing its methods do pagination.

Problem

The problem with TextView is that the visible part of text might be cut vertically somewhere at the middle of the last visible line. Regarding said, we should break a new page when the last line that fully fits into a view's height is met.

Algorithm

• We iterate through the lines of text and check if the line's bottom exceeds the view's height;
• If so, we break a new page and calculate a new value for the cumulative height to compare the following lines' bottom with (see the implementation). The new value is defined as top value (red line in the picture below) of the line that hasn't fit into the previous page + TextView's height.

Implementation

public class Pagination {
    private final boolean mIncludePad;
    private final int mWidth;
    private final int mHeight;
    private final float mSpacingMult;
    private final float mSpacingAdd;
    private final CharSequence mText;
    private final TextPaint mPaint;
    private final List<CharSequence> mPages;

    public Pagination(CharSequence text, int pageW, int pageH, TextPaint paint, float spacingMult, float spacingAdd, boolean inclidePad) {
        this.mText = text;
        this.mWidth = pageW;
        this.mHeight = pageH;
        this.mPaint = paint;
        this.mSpacingMult = spacingMult;
        this.mSpacingAdd = spacingAdd;
        this.mIncludePad = inclidePad;
        this.mPages = new ArrayList<>();

        layout();
    }

    private void layout() {
        final StaticLayout layout = new StaticLayout(mText, mPaint, mWidth, Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_NORMAL, mSpacingMult, mSpacingAdd, mIncludePad);

        final int lines = layout.getLineCount();
        final CharSequence text = layout.getText();
        int startOffset = 0;
        int height = mHeight;

        for (int i = 0; i < lines; i++) {
            if (height < layout.getLineBottom(i)) {
                // When the layout height has been exceeded
                addPage(text.subSequence(startOffset, layout.getLineStart(i)));
                startOffset = layout.getLineStart(i);
                height = layout.getLineTop(i) + mHeight;
            }

            if (i == lines - 1) {
                // Put the rest of the text into the last page
                addPage(text.subSequence(startOffset, layout.getLineEnd(i)));
                return;
            }
        }
    }

    private void addPage(CharSequence text) {
        mPages.add(text);
    }

    public int size() {
        return mPages.size();
    }

    public CharSequence get(int index) {
        return (index >= 0 && index < mPages.size()) ? mPages.get(index) : null;
    }
}

Note 1

The algorithm works not just for TextView (Pagination class uses TextView's parameters in the implementation above). You may pass any set of parameters StaticLayout accepts and later use the paginated layouts to draw text on Canvas/Bitmap/PdfDocument.

You can also use Spannable as yourText parameter for different fonts as well as Html-formatted strings (like in the sample below).

Note 2

When all text has the same font size, all lines have equal height. In that case you might want to consider further optimization of the algorithm by calculating an amount of lines that fits into a single page and jumping to the proper line at each loop iteration.

Sample

The sample below paginates a string containing both html and Spanned text.

public class PaginationActivity extends Activity {
    private TextView mTextView;
    private Pagination mPagination;
    private CharSequence mText;
    private int mCurrentIndex = 0;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_pagination);

        mTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.tv);

        Spanned htmlString = Html.fromHtml(getString(R.string.html_string));

        Spannable spanString = new SpannableString(getString(R.string.long_string));
        spanString.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(Color.BLUE), 0, 24, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        spanString.setSpan(new RelativeSizeSpan(2f), 0, 24, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        spanString.setSpan(new StyleSpan(Typeface.MONOSPACE.getStyle()), 0, 24, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        spanString.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(Color.BLUE), 700, spanString.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        spanString.setSpan(new RelativeSizeSpan(2f), 700, spanString.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
        spanString.setSpan(new StyleSpan(Typeface.MONOSPACE.getStyle()), 700, spanString.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

        mText = TextUtils.concat(htmlString, spanString);

        mTextView.getViewTreeObserver().addOnGlobalLayoutListener(new ViewTreeObserver.OnGlobalLayoutListener() {
            @Override
            public void onGlobalLayout() {
                // Removing layout listener to avoid multiple calls
                mTextView.getViewTreeObserver().removeOnGlobalLayoutListener(this);
                mPagination = new Pagination(mText,
                        mTextView.getWidth(),
                        mTextView.getHeight(),
                        mTextView.getPaint(),
                        mTextView.getLineSpacingMultiplier(),
                        mTextView.getLineSpacingExtra(),
                        mTextView.getIncludeFontPadding());
                update();
            }
        });

        findViewById(R.id.btn_back).setOnClickListener(v -> {
            mCurrentIndex = (mCurrentIndex > 0) ? mCurrentIndex - 1 : 0;
            update();
        });
        findViewById(R.id.btn_forward).setOnClickListener(v -> {
            mCurrentIndex = (mCurrentIndex < mPagination.size() - 1) ? mCurrentIndex + 1 : mPagination.size() - 1;
            update();
        });
    }

    private void update() {
        final CharSequence text = mPagination.get(mCurrentIndex);
        if(text != null) mTextView.setText(text);
    }
}

Activity's layout:

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:paddingLeft="@dimen/activity_horizontal_margin"
    android:paddingRight="@dimen/activity_horizontal_margin"
    android:paddingTop="@dimen/activity_vertical_margin"
    android:paddingBottom="@dimen/activity_vertical_margin" >

    <LinearLayout
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent">

        <Button
            android:id="@+id/btn_back"
            android:layout_width="0dp"
            android:layout_height="match_parent"
            android:layout_weight="1"
            android:background="@android:color/transparent"/>

        <Button
            android:id="@+id/btn_forward"
            android:layout_width="0dp"
            android:layout_height="match_parent"
            android:layout_weight="1"
            android:background="@android:color/transparent"/>

    </LinearLayout>

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/tv"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent"/>

</RelativeLayout>

Screenshot:

Solution 2:

Take a look at my demo project.

The "magic" is in this code:

    mTextView.setText(mText);

    int height = mTextView.getHeight();
    int scrollY = mTextView.getScrollY();
    Layout layout = mTextView.getLayout();
    int firstVisibleLineNumber = layout.getLineForVertical(scrollY);
    int lastVisibleLineNumber = layout.getLineForVertical(height + scrollY);

    //check is latest line fully visible
    if (mTextView.getHeight() < layout.getLineBottom(lastVisibleLineNumber)) {
        lastVisibleLineNumber--;
    }

    int start = pageStartSymbol + mTextView.getLayout().getLineStart(firstVisibleLineNumber);
    int end = pageStartSymbol + mTextView.getLayout().getLineEnd(lastVisibleLineNumber);

    String displayedText = mText.substring(start, end);
    //correct visible text
    mTextView.setText(displayedText);

Solution 3:

Surprisingly finding libraries for Pagination is difficult. I think it's better to use another Android UI element besides TextView. How about WebView? An example @ android-webview-example. Code snippet:

webView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webView1);

String customHtml = "<html><body><h1>Hello, WebView</h1></body></html>";
webView.loadData(customHtml, "text/html", "UTF-8");

Note: This simply loads data onto a WebView, similar to a web browser. But let's not stop with just this idea. Add this UI to using pagination by WebViewClient onPageFinished . Please read on SO link @ html-book-like-pagination. Code snippet from one of the best answer by Dan:

mWebView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
   public void onPageFinished(WebView view, String url) {
   ...
      mWebView.loadUrl("...");
   }
});

Notes:

• The code loads more data upon page scroll.
• On the same webpage, there is a posted answer by Engin Kurutepe to set measurements for the WebView. This is necessary for specifing a page in pagination.

I have not implemented pagination but I think this is a good start and shows promise, should be fast. As you can see, there are developers that have implemented this feature.