How to determine the length of a graphic string?

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 and are right justified but others are left justified and I need to figure out their width so that I can properly offset them.

window.drawString("7/4-Fourth of July",horizontalIndex-Offset,verticalIndex);

Currently I'm averaging the pixel width using an average of both font sizes 10 and 32, but this doesn't really cut it. Can someone help me get the exact offset?

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.

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

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

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

TextLayout, shown here, is another alternative.