CocoaDev

I’m drawing a string in my custom NSView subclass with the [NSString drawAtPoint:NSPoint] method.

This works great… but I need to know how wide the resulting string will be in pixels, so that I can abbreviate it if necessary (it’s going in some kind of simple graphical container). How can I find out whether the drawn string will be too long?

Counting characters in the string is not going to cut it really due to proportionally spaced fonts etc. I can’t be sure that I’ll be cutting the string off at the right point. Although this is the only way I know of off the top of my head.

Use NSAttributedString then you can use its -size method to get the NSSize of it, using whatever font you want.

NSAttributedString *astr = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithString:@”someString”]; NSSize strSize = [astr size]; // contains the size of astr

[astr drawAtPoint:somePoint]; // can use same method for drawing

[astr release];

There’s also the NSString method -sizeWithAttributes: and a code snippet in BetterTruncatingStringsInTableView that demonstrates how to abbreviate a string to fit. – Bo

Find the center of a drawn string

I have drawn an NSString * to a custom view using - drawAtPointWithAttributes and would like to find the center of the string. Is this possible?

The code looks like this:

[text drawAtPoint:center withAttributes:attribs];

–JohnDevor

NSStringDrawing.h

• (NSSize)sizeWithAttributes:(NSDictionary *)attrs;

See also: DynamicallySizingScalingText