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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:24:50+00:00

I’ve been struggling with text measuring and scaled canvases. When the canvas is unscaled,

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I’ve been struggling with text measuring and scaled canvases.

When the canvas is unscaled, getTextBounds and measureText deliver accurate results. However, when the canvas is scaled both methods do not deliver results that match the actual size of a printed text.

For testing I’ve created a subclass of View with the following onDraw method:

final float scaling = 0.51f;
final int fontSize = 50;

canvas.scale(scaling, scaling);
font = Typeface.create("Arial", Typeface.NORMAL);

Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setColor(0xff4444ff);
paint.setTypeface(font);
paint.setTextSize(fontSize);
paint.setAntiAlias(true);

int x = 10;
int y = 100;
final String text = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit...";
canvas.drawText(text, x, y, paint);

// draw border using getTextBounds

paint.setColor(0xffff0000);
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE);
paint.setTypeface(font);
paint.setTextSize(fontSize);
Rect bounds = new Rect();
paint.getTextBounds(text, 0, text.length(), bounds);
bounds.offset(x, y);
paint.setColor(0x80ffff00);
canvas.drawRect(bounds, paint);

// draw border using measureText

float w = paint.measureText(text);
bounds.left = x;
bounds.right = (int) Math.ceil(bounds.left + w);
bounds.top -= 10;
bounds.bottom += 10;
paint.setColor(0x8000ffff);
paint.setPathEffect(new DashPathEffect(new float[] { 10, 10 }, 0));
canvas.drawRect(bounds, paint);

for scaling = 0.5 I get the following output:
canvas scaling 0.5

for scaling = 0.51 the following result is shown:
canvas scaling 0.51

The yellow solid border marks the rect delivered from getTextBounds, the dashed cyan rect is rendered using the width delivered from measureText.

As you can see, the text with scaling = 0.5 is smaller than the measured dimensions and with scaling=0.51 the drawn text is way bigger than the measured dimension.

Any help is appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ok, just found out how to circumvent the issue.

    The problem is that the Paint does not know about the Canvas scaling. Therefore measureText and getTextBounds deliver the unscaled result. But since the font size does not scale linearly (however, the drawn rect does ), you have to make up for that effect manually.

    So the solution would be:

    // paint the text as usual
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setTypeface(font);
paint.setTextSize(fontSize);
canvas.drawText(text, x, y, paint);


// measure the text using scaled font size and correct the scaled value afterwards
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setTypeface(font);
paint.setTextSize(fontSize * scaling);
float w = paint.measureText(text) / scaling;
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