PDFlib 8 Windows COM/.NET Tutorial

Table 8.1 Control characters and their meaning in Textflows
Unicode character
(VB equivalents)
entity name
equiv. Textflow
option
meaning within Textflows
U+0020 SP, space space align words and break lines
U+00A0 NBSP, nbsp (none) (no-break space) space character which will not break lines, and
may change its width according to formatting options such as justification.
U+202F
NNBSP,
nnbsp
(none)
(narrow no-break space) fixed-width space character which will
not break lines, and will not change its width according to formatting
options
U+0009 (VbTab) HT, hortab (none) horizontal tab: will be processed according to the ruler,
tabalignchar, and tabalignment options
U+002D HY, hyphen (none) separator character for hyphenated words
U+00AD SHY, shy (none) (soft hyphen) hyphenation opportunity, only visible at line breaks
U+000B
U+2028
VT, verttab
LS, linesep
nextline
(next line) forces a new line
U+000A (VbLf)
U+000D (VbCr)
U+000D and
U+000A (VbCrLf)
U+0085
U+2029
LF, linefeed
CR, return
CRLF
NEL, newline
PS, parasep
nextparagraph
(next paragraph) Same effect as nextline; in addition, the
parindent option will affect the next line.
U+000C
(VbFormFeed)
FF, formfeed return fit_textflow( ) will stop, and return the string _nextpage.
Mapping/removing characters or sequences of characters. The charmapping option
can be used to map or remove some characters in the text to others. Let’s start with an
easy case where we will map all tabs in the text to space characters. The charmapping option
to achieve this looks as follows:
charmapping={hortab space}
This command uses the symbolic character names hortab and space. You can find a list
of all known character names in the PDFlib API Reference. To achieve multiple mappings
at once you can use the following command which will replace all tabs and line break
combinations with space characters:
charmapping={hortab space CRLF space LF space CR space}
The following command removes all soft hyphens:
charmapping={shy {shy 0}}
Each tab character will be replaced with four space characters:
charmapping={hortab {space 4}}
Each arbitrary long sequence of linefeed characters will be reduced to a single linefeed
character:
216 Chapter 8: Text and Table Formatting (Edition for COM, .NET, and REALbasic)