Can I balance dialogue lines?

You ought to try using the text blitter object. It has a wrapping option, and multiline, the difference between which I do not understand. I use both those options and the dialogue will go to the next line to stop what you are describing. However, if the dialogue is being generated one letter a time like it does in one of my projects, it will not go to the next line until the current line is full (ie you see it move the word to the next line).

Maybe you don't want to use any extensions? Text blitter is apparently only compatible with Windows, Java and Anaconda.

You're welcome. I highly recommend that object.

If for some reason you decide to stick with normal strings, if you are using a monospaced font, you may be able to check the width of the string you are writing to and determine when to start a new line when the string is a certain length. For example, if the font is 32 pixels wide and your string is 320 pixels wide, you would start a new line when 32 * current line characters have been written (you would have some value to keep track of current line). When you start a new line you would have to move the right$ text from the previous line into the new line, by testing when you get to a space, working backwards from the end of the line.

You can format your text lines manually, first calculate how many M fit into a line, this is the maximum chars per line, as M is the widest character. When you are over this number just insert a Newline$ so it jumps to a new line.

Example:
My text line max width is 30 M's.
This is my text: "Hello, mi name is Joseph, I live in this island"
This is what will be shown in 30 characters: "Hello, mi name is Joseph, I li"
This is what I should do to split the text: "Hello, mi name is Joseph,"+Newline$+"I live in this island"

I recently encountered the same problem in a little RPG project I'm working on. Sometimes special symbols would end up isolated on a new line

So I solved this problem by making a fastloop that can be run at any time and which structures the text to be displayed in an alterable string object into the correct number of lines.
The trick is to copy the string letter by letter into a rich edit object of which you can get the number of lines! So as soon as the copied text fills more than one line in the rich edit object, go back to latest space and add a "Newline$", etc.

I use this fast loop for longer text strings (dialogue, skill and item descriptions) and since it's only run when new text gets loaded, the game didn't slow down for me in any way I noticed
I would love to post this as an example .mfa file if anyone knows a good way how to upload such files (ideally so it can only be accessed from this forum)?

Edit: I think I found out how to upload .mfa files as attachment
(Oh, and, by the way, I found out this lining problem only happens in Direct3D display modes (took me a while to figure that out when I tried to reproduce the bug :)))

Please login to see this attachment.

this has been happening to me too. I kid you not, the problem is having your display settings to direct 3d 9. Is there a fix for this?

I've updated my example with comments that are (hopefully) a bit less confusing
The example is a fastloop that basically turns this:

[INDENT]"This string doesn't show up properly
."[/INDENT]

into this:

[INDENT]"This string doesn't show up properly."[/INDENT]

And this:

[INDENT]"Wherever#a number sign#appears#in this string#a new line#is started."[/INDENT]

into this:

[INDENT]"Wherever
a number sign
appears
in this string
a new line
is started."[/INDENT]