Question

I’m using a fixed size font ( eg: “Courier New” ). When I initialize the CFont object by calling CFont::CreateFont function, I want to specify only the font height.

CFont Font;
Font.CreateFont( nFontHeight, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false,
    0, ANSI_CHARSET, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS, CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, DEFAULT_QUALITY,
    FIXED_PITCH|FF_MODERN, _T("Courier New") );

As per documentation, font width will be calculated automatically. I need that automatically calculated value for some other calculation.

GetLogFont Function is useless as it seems CFont only holds the value we give that is width = 0 and it calculates the value only when it is used for first time. ( Please check the Microsoft documentation )

Another option was to use CDC::GetTextExtent using a single character. But in that case also I could see some minor differences even in the height. For example, when I give -32 as height, GetTextExtent returns 33 for y value.

Is there any way to get the correct calculated width?

Answer 1

Have you tried CDC::GetTextMetrics()? I’ve never used it, but it seems to be what you’re looking for. You can get the average and maximum character width, which I guess should be the same for Courier New.