android canvas drawText set font size from width?

Question

I want to draw text on canvas of certain width using .drawtext

For example, the width of the text should always be 400px no ma

Answer 1

Here's a much more efficient method:

/**
 * Sets the text size for a Paint object so a given string of text will be a
 * given width.
 * 
 * @param paint
 *            the Paint to set the text size for
 * @param desiredWidth
 *            the desired width
 * @param text
 *            the text that should be that width
 */
private static void setTextSizeForWidth(Paint paint, float desiredWidth,
        String text) {

    // Pick a reasonably large value for the test. Larger values produce
    // more accurate results, but may cause problems with hardware
    // acceleration. But there are workarounds for that, too; refer to
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6253528/font-size-too-large-to-fit-in-cache
    final float testTextSize = 48f;

    // Get the bounds of the text, using our testTextSize.
    paint.setTextSize(testTextSize);
    Rect bounds = new Rect();
    paint.getTextBounds(text, 0, text.length(), bounds);

    // Calculate the desired size as a proportion of our testTextSize.
    float desiredTextSize = testTextSize * desiredWidth / bounds.width();

    // Set the paint for that size.
    paint.setTextSize(desiredTextSize);
}

Then, all you need to do is setTextSizeForWidth(paint, 400, str); (400 being the example width in the question).

For even greater efficiency, you can make the Rect a static class member, saving it from being instantiated each time. However, this may introduce concurrency issues, and would arguably hinder code clarity.

Answer 2

Michael Scheper's solution seems nice but it didn't work for me, I needed to get the largest text size that is possible to draw in my view but this approach depends on the first text size you set, Every time you set a different size you'll get different results that can not say it is the right answer in every situation.

So I tried another way:

private float calculateMaxTextSize(String text, Paint paint, int maxWidth, int maxHeight) {
    if (text == null || paint == null) return 0;
    Rect bound = new Rect();
    float size = 1.0f;
    float step= 1.0f;    
    while (true) {
        paint.getTextBounds(text, 0, text.length(), bound);
        if (bound.width() < maxWidth && bound.height() < maxHeight) {
            size += step;
            paint.setTextSize(size);
        } else {
            return size - step;
        }
    }
}

It's simple, I increase the text size until the text rect bound dimensions are close enough to maxWidth and maxHeight, to decrease the loop repeats just change step to a bigger value (accuracy vs speed), Maybe it's not the best way to achieve this but It works.

Answer 3

Try this:

/**
 * Retrieve the maximum text size to fit in a given width.
 * @param str (String): Text to check for size.
 * @param maxWidth (float): Maximum allowed width.
 * @return (int): The desired text size.
 */
private int determineMaxTextSize(String str, float maxWidth)
{
    int size = 0;       
    Paint paint = new Paint();

    do {
        paint.setTextSize(++ size);
    } while(paint.measureText(str) < maxWidth);

    return size;
} //End getMaxTextSize()