Measure text returns float value

Question

It is a stupid question, probably... However, what is the unit of measure of the measureText() value returned? I need the width of a text in px. I thought px, dp, sp would be integer values. So why measureText() in TextPaint returns a float value?

Answer 1

Why would the return type not be a float, representhing pixels?

Drawing on screen uses floats all the way down to the GPU level. This makes calculations more convenient and makes it possible to use antialiasing and subpixel rendering.

Dimensions such as px, dp, sp are floats too, though there are convenience methods to get an integer pixel size value.