Paragraph width in text box in graphics mode

#1

I have text box inside a graphics, using the “Long Text” object. Is there a way to set the (max) width of that text box? I tried using “par-width”, but it has no effect. A long text expands across the whole page and I would have to insert hard line break. But I suppose that is not the intended way?

#2

The multiline text box features do not seem to be nicely complete.
Perhaps setting the left and right margins with the environment variables par-left and par-right will get you an acceptable approximation. The box will still be as large as the default paragraph boxes it seemed to me in the test I made; I think you have to set the fill color to none (no background) so that you will be able to see what is below the box.

In the test I made an objects drawn and text typed before generating the text box were still selectable after I covered them with the new text box. So perhaps this way of doing works.

#3

Thank you, it worked by setting left and right margins accordingly. The good thing is, it worked also with e.g. “Ornamented” boxes, but, yes, having to handle the default paragraph long box is not so convenient. I hope we will get a par-width variable in the paragraph formatting at some point (I know, with such statements I probably have volunteered for implementing it myself :wink:)

#4

There is an environment variable that controls how one decides paragraph width, according to the manual, page-width-margin (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/documents/manuals/texmacs-manual.en.pdf, section 15.5, page layout), but I haven’t been able to use it. The manual says that if you set it to true, you can use par-width to set the paragraph width.

You might volunteer for a bug report :wink: : https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/texmacs/
In the submission page, under Item Group (on the right in the page I have looked at while writing this post), you can choose Wishlist to ask for a more convenient way to handle the paragraph formatting. With two bug reports (:wink: again) you could both ask for a better way to handle text box length and report the non-functional page-width-margin environment variable.

G.