Android drawText including text wrapping

Yes, StaticLayout is what you're meant to use to draw multi-line text on a Canvas. Save yourself a world of pain and don't think about breaking text yourself -- you're on the right path.

I'm not sure about the bitmap problem, but your second code above worked just fine to draw text on a canvas for me.

Learn to use StaticLayout , then draw the Layout object onto a canvas using the Layout.draw() method.

References

public Bitmap drawMultilineTextToBitmap(Context gContext,
                                   int gResId,
                                   String gText) {

  // prepare canvas
  Resources resources = gContext.getResources();
  float scale = resources.getDisplayMetrics().density;
  Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(resources, gResId);

  android.graphics.Bitmap.Config bitmapConfig = bitmap.getConfig();
  // set default bitmap config if none
  if(bitmapConfig == null) {
    bitmapConfig = android.graphics.Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888;
  }
  // resource bitmaps are imutable,
  // so we need to convert it to mutable one
  bitmap = bitmap.copy(bitmapConfig, true);

  Canvas canvas = new Canvas(bitmap);

  // new antialiased Paint
  TextPaint paint=new TextPaint(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG);
  // text color - #3D3D3D
  paint.setColor(Color.rgb(61, 61, 61));
  // text size in pixels
  paint.setTextSize((int) (14 * scale));
  // text shadow
  paint.setShadowLayer(1f, 0f, 1f, Color.WHITE);

  // set text width to canvas width minus 16dp padding
  int textWidth = canvas.getWidth() - (int) (16 * scale);

  // init StaticLayout for text
  StaticLayout textLayout = new StaticLayout(
    gText, paint, textWidth, Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_CENTER, 1.0f, 0.0f, false);

  // get height of multiline text
  int textHeight = textLayout.getHeight();

  // get position of text's top left corner
  float x = (bitmap.getWidth() - textWidth)/2;
  float y = (bitmap.getHeight() - textHeight)/2;

  // draw text to the Canvas center
  canvas.save();
  canvas.translate(x, y);
  textLayout.draw(canvas);
  canvas.restore();

  return bitmap;
}

source : http://www.skoumal.net/en/android-drawing-multiline-text-on-bitmap/