Java: Getting a font with a specific height in pixels

Question

It’s easy to determine the rendered height of a font using FontMetrics, but what about the other way around? How can I obtain a font that will fit into a specif

Answer 1

WhiteFang34's code is useful in combination with the following method that returns the actual height of a specific string. It might be a bit slow for real-time rendering, especially for large fonts/strings and I'm sure it can be further optimised, but for now it meets my own needs and is fast enough to run in a back-end process.

/*
 * getFontRenderedHeight
 * *************************************************************************
 * Summary: Font metrics do not give an accurate measurement of the rendered
 * font height for certain strings because the space between the ascender
 * limit and baseline is not always fully used and descenders may not be
 * present. for example the strings '0' 'a' 'f' and 'j' are all different
 * heights from top to bottom but the metrics returned are always the same.
 * If you want to place text that exactly fills a specific height, you need
 * to work out what the exact height is for the specific string. This method
 * achieves that by rendering the text and then scanning the top and bottom
 * rows until the real height of the string is found.
 */
/**
 * Calculate the actual height of rendered text for a specific string more
 * accurately than metrics when ascenders and descenders may not be present
 * 

 * Note: this method is probably not very efficient for repeated measurement
 * of large strings and large font sizes but it works quite effectively for
 * short strings. Consider measuring a subset of your string value. Also
 * beware of measuring symbols such as '-' and '.' the results may be
 * unexpected!
 * 
 * @param string
 *            The text to measure. You might be able to speed this process
 *            up by only measuring a single character or subset of your
 *            string i.e if you know your string ONLY contains numbers and
 *            all the numbers in the font are the same height, just pass in
 *            a single digit rather than the whole numeric string.
 * @param font
 *            The font being used. Obviously the size of the font affects
 *            the result
 * @param targetGraphicsContext
 *            The graphics context the text will actually be rendered in.
 *            This is passed in so the rendering options for anti-aliasing
 *            can be matched.
 * @return Integer - the exact actual height of the text.
 * @author Robert Heritage [mrheritage@gmail.com]
 */
public Integer getFontRenderedHeight(String string, Font font, Graphics2D targetGraphicsContext) {
    BufferedImage image;
    Graphics2D g;
    Color textColour = Color.white;

    // In the first instance; use a temporary BufferedImage object to render
    // the text and get the font metrics.
    image = new BufferedImage(1, 1, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
    g = image.createGraphics();
    FontMetrics metrics = g.getFontMetrics(font);
    Rectangle2D rect = metrics.getStringBounds(string, g);

    // now set up the buffered Image with a canvas size slightly larger than
    // the font metrics - this guarantees that there is at least one row of
    // black pixels at the top and the bottom
    image = new BufferedImage((int) rect.getWidth() + 1, (int) metrics.getHeight() + 2, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
    g = image.createGraphics();

    // take the rendering hints from the target graphics context to ensure
    // the results are accurate.
    g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, targetGraphicsContext.getRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING));
    g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING, targetGraphicsContext.getRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING));

    g.setColor(textColour);
    g.setFont(font);
    g.drawString(string, 0, image.getHeight());

    // scan the bottom row - descenders will be cropped initially, so the
    // text will need to be moved up (down in the co-ordinates system) to
    // fit it in the canvas if it contains any. This may need to be done a
    // few times until there is a row of black pixels at the bottom.
    boolean foundBottom, foundTop = false;
    int offset = 0;
    do {
        g.setColor(Color.BLACK);
        g.fillRect(0, 0, image.getWidth(), image.getHeight());
        g.setColor(textColour);
        g.drawString(string, 0, image.getHeight() - offset);

        foundBottom = true;
        for (int x = 0; x < image.getWidth(); x++) {
            if (image.getRGB(x, image.getHeight() - 1) != Color.BLACK.getRGB()) {
                foundBottom = false;
            }
        }
        offset++;
    } while (!foundBottom);

    System.out.println(image.getHeight());

    // Scan the top of the image downwards one line at a time until it
    // contains a non-black pixel. This loop uses the break statement to
    // stop the while loop as soon as a non-black pixel is found, this
    // avoids the need to scan the rest of the line
    int y = 0;
    do {
        for (int x = 0; x < image.getWidth(); x++) {
            if (image.getRGB(x, y) != Color.BLACK.getRGB()) {
                foundTop = true;
                break;
            }
        }
        y++;
    } while (!foundTop);

    return image.getHeight() - y;
}