[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: FontMetrics missing some usefull functio

[Hans Deragon <hans@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:
> Hans Deragon wrote:
>
> >   Using FontMetric.getAverageCharWidth() is not good enough.  I do not 
> > want the average, I want the size of the largest (usually 'm').
>
>
> Why don't you simply enumerate all chars using GC#getAdvanceWidth() and 
> calculate the maximum yourself?

Because I did not know that this function existed?  :)

> However, please note that the advance width of two characters as 
> measured by GC#stringExtent might not be the sum of the widths of both 
> characters.  If you want to measure strings, use the latter method 
> because that known about kerning and stuff.

Why are all these functions part or GC, instead of FontMetrics?  I know, you 
probably do not have the answer.

> Furthermore, the advance width isn't the real width of the character 
> glyph. This can be determined with GC#getCharWidth.  This value however 
> can't be used to calcuate the extent of a bounding box that contains a 
> drawn character because - AFAIK - there's no way to determine the 
> initial indent or the overhang of the character glyph.

Thanks for the info.  Anybody would have a nice html page to point to, which 
explains all these fonts characteristics?  I am lost at all of this.

Here is what I want to do.  I want to have a text field that can contain Y 
characters.  So I want to calculate its size accordingly, using the formula 
Y*<Width of largest character), and then pass this into computeSize() to get 
the size of the Text widget, and then pass the width to the FormData.width 
attribute.

> bye

Thanks for your reply.  Its appreciated.
Hans Deragon
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