How to determine the length of a graphic string?

Question

I\'m creating a graphical timeline out of an excel document and I need to have small tags of the name of the event next to the marker for that event. Some of these are easy

Answer 1

As a (read: my ;-) general rule, never use the Graphics-level drawString methods. Instead, use a JLabel/CellRendererPane pair to "stamp" the text onto whatever component.

The advantages

• anti-alias is handled automagically
• size calculations are done in the labels' bowels, so positioning calculations dont require any low-level methods but simply based on the labels' prefSize