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

This thread explains how to do it: Calculate the display width of a string in Java

You should first get the font metrics, and then ask the metrics how wide a certain string is.

Answer 2

and another good alternative is SwingUtilities#computeStringWidth(FontMetrics fm, String str)

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

TextLayout, shown here, is another alternative.

Answer 5

from a java.awt.Graphics object, you can call getFontMetrics. the FontMetrics object has a getStringBounds method that does what you need.

here's the documentation