Question

I just wrote some code to scale a font to fit within (the length of) a rectangle. It starts at 18 width and iterates down until it fits.

This seems horribly inefficient, but I can’t find a non-looping way to do it.
This line is for labels in a game grid that scales, so I can’t see a work-around solution (wrapping, cutting off and extending past the rectangle are all unacceptable).

It’s actually pretty quick, I’m doing this for hundreds of rectangles and it’s fast enough to just slow it down a touch.

If nobody comes up with anything better, I’ll just load the starting guess from a table (so that it’s much closer than 18) and use this–except for the lag it works great.

public Font scaleFont(String text, Rectangle rect, Graphics g, Font pFont) {
    float nextTry=18.0f;
    Font font=pFont;

    while(x > 4) {                             
            font=g.getFont().deriveFont(nextTry);
            FontMetrics fm=g.getFontMetrics(font);
            int width=fm.stringWidth(text);
            if(width <= rect.width)
                return font;
            nextTry*=.9;            
    }
    return font;
}

Answer 1

Semi-pseudo code:

public Font scaleFont(
    String text, Rectangle rect, Graphics g, Font font) {
    float fontSize = 20.0f;

    font = g.getFont().deriveFont(fontSize);
    int width = g.getFontMetrics(font).stringWidth(text);
    fontSize = (rect.width / width ) * fontSize;
    return g.getFont().deriveFont(fontSize);
}

---

A derivation that iterates:

/**
 * Adjusts the given {@link Font}/{@link String} size such that it fits
 * within the bounds of the given {@link Rectangle}.
 *
 * @param label    Contains the text and font to scale.
 * @param dst      The bounds for fitting the string.
 * @param graphics The context for rendering the string.
 * @return A new {@link Font} instance that is guaranteed to write the given
 * string within the bounds of the given {@link Rectangle}.
 */
public Font scaleFont(
    final JLabel label, final Rectangle dst, final Graphics graphics ) {
  assert label != null;
  assert dst != null;
  assert graphics != null;

  final var font = label.getFont();
  final var text = label.getText();

  final var frc = ((Graphics2D) graphics).getFontRenderContext();

  final var dstWidthPx = dst.getWidth();
  final var dstHeightPx = dst.getHeight();

  var minSizePt = 1f;
  var maxSizePt = 1000f;
  var scaledFont = font;
  float scaledPt = scaledFont.getSize();

  while( maxSizePt - minSizePt > 1f ) {
    scaledFont = scaledFont.deriveFont( scaledPt );

    final var layout = new TextLayout( text, scaledFont, frc );
    final var fontWidthPx = layout.getVisibleAdvance();

    final var metrics = scaledFont.getLineMetrics( text, frc );
    final var fontHeightPx = metrics.getHeight();

    if( (fontWidthPx > dstWidthPx) || (fontHeightPx > dstHeightPx) ) {
      maxSizePt = scaledPt;
    }
    else {
      minSizePt = scaledPt;
    }

    scaledPt = (minSizePt + maxSizePt) / 2;
  }

  return scaledFont.deriveFont( (float) Math.floor( scaledPt ) );
}

Imagine you want to add a label to a component that has rectangular bounds r such that the label completely fills the component’s area. One could write:

final Font DEFAULT_FONT = new Font( "DejaVu Sans", BOLD, 12 );
final Color COLOUR_LABEL = new Color( 33, 33, 33 );

// TODO: Return a valid container component instance.
final var r = getComponent().getBounds();
final var graphics = getComponent().getGraphics();

final int width = (int) r.getWidth();
final int height = (int) r.getHeight();

final var label = new JLabel( text );
label.setFont( DEFAULT_FONT );
label.setSize( width, height );
label.setForeground( COLOUR_LABEL );

final var scaledFont = scaleFont( label, r, graphics );
label.setFont( scaledFont );