android canvas drawText set font size from width?

Badal picture Badal · Aug 28, 2012 · Viewed 71.6k times · Source

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

For example, the width of the text should always be 400px no matter what the input text is.

If input text is longer it will decrease the font size, if input text is shorter it will increase the font size accordingly.

Answer

Michael Scheper picture Michael Scheper · Feb 20, 2014

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.