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Determine the (pixel) width of a string

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Hi,
I want to scale some ui elements according to the width of a string. E.g. the string 'abcdef' has 6 letters, but is obviously much wider than the string 'iiiiii', which also uses 6 letters.
Is there a good way to calculate the pixel width of a string?
(if Fontsize and Font are known)

Accepted Answer

Benjamin Kraus
Benjamin Kraus on 3 Feb 2022
Edited: Benjamin Kraus on 3 Feb 2022
The only way I know of to do that in MATLAB is using the Extent property on text objects. The third element is the width, the fourth element is the height.
t1 = text(0.5,0.3,'abcdef','FontName','Times','FontSize',10);
t2 = text(0.5,0.5,'iiiiii','FontName','Times','FontSize',10);
t1.Units = 'pixels';
t1.Extent
ans = 1×4
224.5000 97.9000 41.0000 18.0000
t2.Units = 'pixels';
t2.Extent
ans = 1×4
224.5000 168.5000 20.0000 18.0000
  5 Comments
Max Heimann
Max Heimann on 4 Feb 2022
One more question:
Will the result of this be the same on every machine if i set the unit to 'Points'?
Benjamin Kraus
Benjamin Kraus on 4 Feb 2022
The answer should be pretty close across different machines, but I'm not sure if you will get the exact same value across different computers. My guess is that the answer may depend very slightly on the operating system and perhaps the pixel density of the screen, but I could be wrong about that.

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