Labels and optimising font size

[Mike Borrowdale]

--

Hi,

my application simulates a panel of scientific instruments. Digital
readouts are provided by label components embedded in a
TableLayoutPanel with the rows and columns set to percentages of size,
so the labels expane and contract when the application is resized. So
far so good. My customer wants the maximum text size possible for easy
readability, but the labels seem to require a lot of 'white space'
around any text they are given. Seems to be about 20% of height and
possibly more of width is empty space. Is there any way to reduce that
unused area?

Second problem occurs on resize of the application - is there a way to
determine the maximum size of font that will fit in the available label
size without clipping the text?

Mike B

[Peter Duniho]

First suggestion: don't put the characters "-- " in your post except for
the actual purpose of separating a signature from the rest of your post.
Many newsreaders (including my own) format the signature differently, and
also strip signatures out from quotes by default. The way you wrote you
post, the entire message appeared to be a signature and thus was difficult
to read and needed special handling just to quote it.

Please don't do that. :)

As far as the question goes:

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:25:53 -0700, Mike Borrowdale
<mi**@borrowdale.me.ukwrote:

my application simulates a panel of scientific instruments. Digital
readouts are provided by label components embedded in a
TableLayoutPanel with the rows and columns set to percentages of size,
so the labels expane and contract when the application is resized. So
far so good. My customer wants the maximum text size possible for easy
readability, but the labels seem to require a lot of 'white space'
around any text they are given. Seems to be about 20% of height and
possibly more of width is empty space. Is there any way to reduce that
unused area?

It's hard to know exactly what part of the formatting you're asking about,
but you may want to look at the Margin and Padding proeprties. These
control external and internal whitespace for the control.

Second problem occurs on resize of the application - is there a way to
determine the maximum size of font that will fit in the available label
size without clipping the text?

There's not any direct way, but you can measure the text with the
Graphics.MeasureString() or TextRenderer.MeasureText() methods and compare
that to the size of the control.

Fonts don't scale in a perfectly linear fashion, so the only 100% accurate
way to do that is to iteratively check larger and larger font sizes until
you find one that doesn't fit. However, you can use a ratio-based
calculation to get pretty close using just one measurement (measure the
text at a specific size, then calculate the ratio of the resulting size to
the size of the control...then apply the ratio to the size you measured to
get the maximum size possible). If you can live with the text
occasionally not fitting perfectly, or you can provide a little extra
white space to account for the times it's a little off, that would be fine.

Pete

[Mike Borrowdale]

Hi Peter,

sorry about the formatting thing. I didn't write those characters so
I'll go and practice where it doesn't matter until I understand what
I'm doing wrong.

Back to the questions. Padding is sort-of what I'm looking for. But
even with Padding = 0 there is still quite a large space around the
displayed text in a label. Increasing the padding increases the space
but, of course, one cannot decrease Padding from 0!

I will take a look at Graphics.MeasureString() and
extRenderer.MeasureText() to see how I can use them to predict the text
size to use. Thank you for the advice.

Mike
Peter Duniho wrote:

First suggestion: don't put the characters "-- " in your post except
for the actual purpose of separating a signature from the rest of
your post. Many newsreaders (including my own) format the signature
differently, and also strip signatures out from quotes by default.
The way you wrote you post, the entire message appeared to be a
signature and thus was difficult to read and needed special handling
just to quote it.

Please don't do that. :)

As far as the question goes:

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:25:53 -0700, Mike Borrowdale
<mi**@borrowdale.me.ukwrote:

my application simulates a panel of scientific instruments. Digital
readouts are provided by label components embedded in a
TableLayoutPanel with the rows and columns set to percentages of
size, so the labels expane and contract when the application is
resized. So far so good. My customer wants the maximum text size
possible for easy readability, but the labels seem to require a lot
of 'white space' around any text they are given. Seems to be about
20% of height and possibly more of width is empty space. Is there
any way to reduce that unused area?

It's hard to know exactly what part of the formatting you're asking
about, but you may want to look at the Margin and Padding
proeprties. These control external and internal whitespace for the
control.

Second problem occurs on resize of the application - is there a way
to determine the maximum size of font that will fit in the
available label size without clipping the text?

There's not any direct way, but you can measure the text with the
Graphics.MeasureString() or TextRenderer.MeasureText() methods and
compare that to the size of the control.

Fonts don't scale in a perfectly linear fashion, so the only 100%
accurate way to do that is to iteratively check larger and larger
font sizes until you find one that doesn't fit. However, you can
use a ratio-based calculation to get pretty close using just one
measurement (measure the text at a specific size, then calculate the
ratio of the resulting size to the size of the control...then apply
the ratio to the size you measured to get the maximum size
possible). If you can live with the text occasionally not fitting
perfectly, or you can provide a little extra white space to account
for the times it's a little off, that would be fine.

Pete

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