Scrolling TextArea

How would one go about creating a scrolling text area with a variable quantity of text?

I'm used to high level GUI elements, where I could drop in a text area and turn on the vertical scroll bar. Then the scroll bar would automatically activate and adjust when the text area fills up.

I'm having a hard time finding a convenient way to handle scrolling text areas in Unity. Is it really necessary to calculate how much space a chunk of text will fill up in order to determine it's height, just to implement a variable scroll bar?

 

No it isn't. GUILayout will do those calculations for you:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/GUILayout.BeginScrollView.html

 

Cool, got it. I forgot all about the GUILayout class. Is there a way to determine what the maximum possible scroll is for a scroll view? For instance, if I want a scrollable text field to always be scrolled to the bottom.

 

Nevermind, I figured it out. I set the y value of the scroll vector to Mathf.Infinity. That did the trick. Thanks for you help.

 

what does that line look like?

 

I think it was something like this:

Code (csharp):

1. BeginScrollView (Vector2(0, Mathf.Infinity));

The first value passed to BeginScrollView is a Vector2 for the x and y position of where the view is scrolled. It's not necessary to know what the max scroll value is, because the view won't go past the maximum scrolled point. By setting the y value to Math.Infinity, you can ensure that it will always be scrolled to the bottom.

If you want to bother with horizontal scrolling, you'd probably need to do something like this:

Code (csharp):

1. var scroll : Vector2;
2.  
3. function whatever () {
4.     if (!scroll) { scroll = new Vector2(0,0); }
5.     scroll = BeginScrollView(Vector2(scroll.x, Mathf.Infinity));
6. }

- John

 

thanks!!!

got that working.

only call it on hit return/enter and works like a charm.
rest of the time, user can scroll wherever.

I really appreciate your assistance.

 

Glad I could help!