Need a way to scale a font to fit a rectangle

Question

I just wrote some code to scale a font to fit within (the length of) a rectangle. It starts at 18 width and iterates down until it fits.

This seems horribly ineffic

Answer 1

You could use interpolation search:

public static Font scaleFont(String text, Rectangle rect, Graphics g, Font pFont) {
    float min=0.1f;
    float max=72f;
    float size=18.0f;
    Font font=pFont;

    while(max - min <= 0.1) {
        font = g.getFont().deriveFont(size);
        FontMetrics fm = g.getFontMetrics(font);
        int width = fm.stringWidth(text);
        if (width == rect.width) {
            return font;
        } else {
            if (width < rect.width) {
                min = size;
            } else {
                max = size;
            }
            size = Math.min(max, Math.max(min, size * (float)rect.width / (float)width));
        }
    }
    return font;
}