Wrapping Static Text in wxPython

In addition to packing for NYC this morning, I’m working on getting a new release of ccTag out the door. I’m working on lots of UI issues at the moment, and part of that relates to wxPython’s StaticText widget (“Label” to you recovering Win32 programmers). Unfortunately, the StaticText widget doesn’t support automagic word-wrapping, so I’ve derived a new class which may be of interest to others.

StaticWrapText acts like a regular StaticText widget, with the exception that it will attempt to word wrap it’s contents as it’s resized. This makes it much easier to use a single XRC across platforms where font sizes, etc may impact line breaks in a normal StaticText widget. You can find the source in stext.py . The source includes the widget class, an XRC resource handler, and a very simple sample which will execute when you run stext.py directly. The sample demonstrates how to use the XRC resource handler.

There are a couple areas that could use improvement. Currently the resize is only called when the widget receives an EVT_SIZE event, so it’s possible that your app could start with the text unwrapped. I’ve worked around this by manually calling OnSize on the widget when I create it. Not an ideal solution, but one that works for now.

Second, the word wrap algorithm I wrote is, well, stupid. But it was quick and dirty, so I ran with it. I’m open to suggestions and improvements.