[reportlab-users] Finding out the width/height of text

[Meitham Jamaa]

Jotham wrote:

> Hello,

> 

> I am wanting to use ReportLab to generate both a bitmap (for live preview in

> a client application) and PDF for dispatch to a printer.  I have a client

> application that allows some basic alterations to be made by the user, for

> this to work I need to be able to find out some geometry information for a

> given piece of text at a given font and style.  I can't see how to do this

> in ReportLab.  Ideally I would be able to render out just the text in

> question to a bitmap surface of some kind, work with that, and once

> everything is finalised generate the PDF.


If you text is one line string then you can use
from reportlab.pdfbase.pdfmetrics import stringWidth
textWidth = stringWidth(text, fontName, fontSize)

If your text was multi-lines, assuming you are working in a rectangular area with defined width,
then do

from reportlab.lib.utils import simpleSplit
lines = simpleSplit(text, fontName, fontSize, maxWidth)

lines is a list of all the lines of your paragraph, if you know the line spacing value then the
height of the paragraph can be calculated as lineSpacing*len(lines)

I hope this helps
Meitham