January 11th, 2007

How do I put more than 32,000 characters into a rich text control?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Last time we looked at loading an entire file into a rich text control. The code runs great, until you try to use it to display a license agreement provided by your legal department, and then some paranoid user reports that they can’t read past page seven. (What, somebody reads those things?) What’s going on?

If you don’t specify otherwise, the maximum number of characters in a rich edit control is 32,767 charaters. (This limit exists for compatibility with the original rich edit control.) You can raise the limit with the EM_EXLIMITTEXT message. Therefore, we need to slip the line 

SendMessage(hwnd, EM_EXLIMITTEXT, 0, -1);

into the program before it calls FillRichEditFromStream.

Next time, the mystery of rich edit printing.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Code

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion are closed.

Read next