Building a Ticker

[kraves]

Hi, I've been been trying to make a Ticker equivalent in powerpoint.
A single slide that loops once the ticker crawls by, updating ticker contents from a single line textfile.

I started with a textbox, got it working fine, except it will always wordwrap at around 67 characters even with wordwrap false. Here's a code snippet
I was trying lots of tags to try and get past this.

Sub UpdateTickerText()
Dim oShp, oNewShp As Shape
    Dim Temp
    Dim InputBuffer As String
    Dim FileNum As Integer
    FileNum = FreeFile
'Select Shape with Ticker Text
    Set oShp = ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange.Shapes("Text Box 10")
If Not TickerFileName <> "" Then SelectTickerTextFile
    If Dir$(TickerFileName) <> "" Then      ' file exists, continue
        Open TickerFileName For Input As FileNum
        While Not EOF(FileNum)
        Input #FileNum, InputBuffer
        ' Do whatever you need to with the contents of InputBuffer
        MsgBox (InputBuffer)
        Temp = oShp.Left
        With oShp.TextFrame
            '.DeleteText
            .TextRange.Text = InputBuffer
            .WordWrap = msoFalse
            .TextRange.Font.Name = TickerFont
            .TextRange.Font.Size = TickerSize
            .TextRange.ChangeCase (ppCaseUpper)
            .AutoSize = ppAutoSizeNone
            .VerticalAnchor = msoAnchorMiddle
            .HorizontalAnchor = msoAnchorNone
            .TextRange.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = ppAlignLeft
            .TextRange.ParagraphFormat.WordWrap = msoFalse
        End With
   Wend
        Close FileNum
    End If
End Sub

Any Ideas to solve this one? Am I missing a tag somewhere?

So I moved on to use wordart which is basically working fine until I hit a 199/200 char limit. I'm guessing this is the max length of wordart text.
Here's a snippet:

'Create new Ticker using wordart object
Set oShp = ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange.Shapes.AddTextEffect _
               (PresetTextEffect:=msoTextEffect1, Text:=InputBuffer, FontName:=TickerFont, _
               FontSize:=TickerSize, FontBold:=msoFalse, FontItalic:=msoFalse, _
               Left:=TickerLeft, Top:=TickerTop)

Any ideas on getting around the 200 limit?
My only thought is to create multiple wordarts end to end, group them, then aniumate the group.
Alternatively has anyone coded a similar routine and willing to share?


cheers, kraves