Full-justification with a Java Graphics.drawString replacement?
2d, graphics, java, text
Solution
Although not the most elegant nor robust solution, here's an method that will take the `Font` of the current `Graphics` object and obtain its `FontMetrics` in order to find out where to draw the text, and if necessary, move to a new line:
public void drawString(Graphics g, String s, int x, int y, int width)
{
// FontMetrics gives us information about the width,
// height, etc. of the current Graphics object's Font.
FontMetrics fm = g.getFontMetrics();
int lineHeight = fm.getHeight();
int curX = x;
int curY = y;
String[] words = s.split(" ");
for (String word : words)
{
// Find out thw width of the word.
int wordWidth = fm.stringWidth(word + " ");
// If text exceeds the width, then move to next line.
if (curX + wordWidth >= x + width)
{
curY += lineHeight;
curX = x;
}
g.drawString(word, curX, curY);
// Move over to the right for next word.
curX += wordWidth;
}
}
This implementation will separate the given `String` into an array of `String` by using the `split` method with a space character as the only word separator, so it's probably not very robust. It also assumes that the word is followed by a space character and acts accordingly when moving the `curX` position.
I wouldn't recommend using this implementation if I were you, but probably the functions that are needed in order to make another implementation would still use the methods provided by the `FontMetrics` class.
Problem
Does anyone know of existing code that lets you draw fully justified text in Java2D? For example, if I said, `drawString("sample text here", x, y, width)`, is there an existing library that could figure out how much of that text fits within the width, do some inter-character spacing to make the text look good, and automatically do basic word wrapping?