First let me say that I’m very new to android development (although I have a good understanding of the basics of java), and I am building a magazine reader app for a campus publication I work for.
I want to display each article using a ViewPager widget. I’m going to build a java program which enables the magazine editor to post articles in .txt format onto a server, along with images associated with each, and have the android app periodically download these articles to a local folder.
I’m a little confused about how to construct the views for each ViewPager from the text files. Somehow my logic needs to determine the size of the screen running the app, in order to know how many words can fit on each screen.
Is this right, or am I fundamentally misunderstanding ViewPager somehow? If so, how might I structure the program to configure the views dynamically based on the txt + images given to it?
From what I understand, each page will contain as much of the article as possible, and when the user selects the article they will be able to see the entire thing. Something like this, but so it fills up the entire screen?
If this is the case, you have two options here:
EDIT:
Here’s a different interpretation of your question.
From what I understand, you’re trying to have something like an eBook reader with an undefined number of pages; kind of what Flipboard does:
Basically, once all the text fills in the entire area you want to have it continue to the next page.
The easiest way to do this, if you do not need native performance, would be to just use a
WebView, split the text across several columns, and have only one column be visible at a time.However, it is certainly possible to calculate how tall the entire text would be and then split it up accordingly; i.e. Pagination in Android TextView
It seems similar questions have been asked and addressed: Splitting a TextView into multiple TextViews relative to screen height (see the accepted answer).