Determine how wide a rendered character is in .NET

Question

Lets say I render the character "A" to the screen with a size 14 font in Arial Regular. Is there a way in C# to calculate how many pixels wide it is?

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The way I'm rendering text is through ESRI's ArcEngine which makes calls to GDI or GDI+ (I don't know which) in a round about fashion via the DynamicDisplay engine.

Answer 1

It depends on the rendering engine being used. .NET may use GDI or GDI+. Switching can be done by setting the UseCompatibleTextRendering property accordingly or calling the Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault method.

When using GDI+ you should use MeasureString:

string s = "A sample string";

SizeF size = e.Graphics.MeasureString(s, new Font("Arial", 24));

When using GDI (i.e. the native Win32 rendering) you should use the TextRenderer class:

SizeF size = TextRenderer.MeasureText(s, new Font("Arial", 24));

More details are described in this article:

Text Rendering: Build World-Ready Apps Using Complex Scripts In Windows Forms Controls

Note that the above talks about Windows Forms. In WPF you would be using FormattedText

Answer 2

Here's an MSDN piece about determining font metrics. You can use Graphics.MeasureString to do the measurement.

Answer 3

You don’t say how you “render” it, but if you have a string, you can use MeasureString too.

Answer 4

Graphics.MeasureString will get you the size in the current graphics units.