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.NET System.Drawing.MeasureString is grotesquely flawed?

Hey, I am having problems with System.Drawing.MeasureString. I'm putting text on a form and I would like to detect which character the user clicked on, so I'm doing some measurements with MeasureString. However, it doesn't seem to work very well. I've confirmed this with the code below, please cut-and-paste it into a new VB.NET project and you'll see what I mean.

Basically the measurements are all off, and this remains true for various fonts and sizes. You'll notice at the end it doesn't even seem to get the width of the 'x' right, and there is a cumulative error as the series proceeds.

As a minor side issue I can't get it to stop "trimming" the spaces off the end of my strings before measuring, but I can work around that.

Is there an alternative to MeasureString that works better? Or is what I'm trying to do just not possible, I'm at the mercy of the text renderer?

Thanks for any thoughts or insights.

Public Class Form1

    Public Sub New()

        ' This call is required by the designer.
        InitializeComponent()

        ' Add any initialization after the InitializeComponent() call.

        Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.ResizeRedraw, True)
        SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint, True)
        SetStyle(ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer, True)

    End Sub

    Dim myfont As New Font("Tahoma", 12)
    Dim mybrush As New SolidBrush(Color.Black)
    Dim mytext As String = "four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nationxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"

    Private Sub Form1_Paint(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs) Handles Me.Paint

        Dim g As Graphics = e.Graphics


        Dim start_x As Single = 20
        Dim y As Single = 20
        Dim h As Single = 20
        Dim btm As Single = y + h

        g.DrawRectangle(Pens.LightBlue, New Rectangle(start_x, y, 2000, h))
        g.DrawString(mytext, myfont, mybrush, start_x, y)

        Dim temp_sz As SizeF

        For n As Integer = 0 To mytext.Length - 1

            temp_sz = g.MeasureString(mytext.Substring(0, n + 1), myfont, 2000, System.Drawing.StringFormat.GenericDefault)

            Dim xtemp As Single = temp_sz.Width + start_x
            g.DrawLine(Pens.Gray, xtemp, y, xtemp, btm)

        Next

    End Sub

End Class

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SOLUTION

Avodah

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Erick37

If you set the StringFormat to .GenericTypographic it will work better, but it's probably not what you want. Each measurement will contain some padding to the right of the last letter so you will not see a neat box around each letter.

g.DrawString(mytext, myfont, mybrush, start_x, y, StringFormat.GenericTypographic)

...

temp_sz = g.MeasureString(mytext.Substring(0, n + 1), myfont, 2000, System.Drawing.StringFormat.GenericTypographic)

riceman0

ASKER

DaTribe: not sure I follow, the rectangle I drew was just an arbitrary large width. And isn't getting a read on things like the kerning what MeasureString is all about? I thought that's why you provided the entire string, the font, and the graphics context. If it's not considering kerning then MeasureString is just looking up and totaling character widths for the given font -- that would indeed be useless and I have to think MeasureString is doing more than that.

Erick37: looks no better with GenericTypographic unfortunately. Still not even getting the 'x' width right. In fact, the drawn 'x' seems *wider* than the measurestring calculation, so the padding wouldn't fully explain that.

However I should play with other options on that stringformat maybe.

So... do I gather so far there is no better alternative to MeasureString?

To compare, maybe I'll try that old technique of writing to an invisible Autosize label control and seeing what width it assumes.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Erick37

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SOLUTION

Todd Gerbert

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