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I am trying to use ui.measure_string. I do a simple call to print out the results. I get a tuple (0,0) as the result. It seems weird as I am not doing anything tricky. The documentation says it will return the width,height as it would be rendered with draw_string, given the optional parameters of font etc. My plan is to use it with labels, I assume the labels are also rendered with draw_string.

The simplest code possible below returns (0.0, 0.0)

import ui

print ui.measure_string('my name')

Any help appreciated

I think you need to call that function from within a GState. Never used those, so I can't help you very much, but they're documented near the bottom of the ui docs.

The code above give me (50.88, 14.32) but I am running today's Beta release.

Unfortunately, ui.measure_string is mostly broken in 1.5.

Ok, thanks omz. Not a huge problem.

This appears to work. I have done some tests. Appears to be 1 or 2 pixelsout. But this could be margins in the label. Anyway, close enough for what I wanted. Maybe there's a lot easier way to do this. It's the best I could come up with my limited experience. I did it as a class so not to have the overhead of setting up the image etc... If this is a stupid idea or there is a far simpler way of doing it , would appreciate the feedback.

import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont

class MeasureString(object):
    def __init__(self, font):
        self.image = Image.open("")
        self.draw = ImageDraw.Draw(self.image)
        self.font = ImageFont.truetype(font[0], font[1])

    def set_font(self, font):
        #not sure if i have to del the prev font
        self.font = ImageFont.truetype(font[0], font[1])

    def measure_string(self, s, font = None):
        self.set_font(font) if font else False
        return self.draw.textsize(s, self.font)

    def __del__(self):
        # i think this is correct
        del self.draw


if __name__ == '__main__':
    font = ('Helvetica', 16)
    ms = MeasureString(font)

    print ms.measure_string('a test string')

Hmmmm, well I feel pretty stupid now. As useless as the above code is, still helped me learn something.

I guess the more correct code should be

import ImageFont

def measure_string(s, font):
    return ImageFont.truetype(font[0], font[1]).getsize(s)

f = ('Helvetica', 16)
print measure_string('i made a foolish mistake', f)

Live an learn :)