Calculating the pixel size of a string with Python

Posted by Aristide on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Aristide
Published on 2010-05-27T15:05:39Z Indexed on 2010/05/27 15:11 UTC
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I have a Python script which needs to calculate the exact size of arbitrary strings displayed in arbitrary fonts in order to generate simple diagrams. I can easily do it with Tkinter. The problem is the results seem to depend on the version of Python and/or the system.

import Tkinter as tk
import tkFont
root = tk.Tk()
times12 = tkFont.Font(family="times",size=12)
print times12.metrics("linespace"),
print times12.measure("Hello world")
times24 = tkFont.Font(family="times",size=24)
print times24.metrics("linespace"),
print times24.measure("Hello world")

Python 2.5 on Mac OS X gives the actual pixel measurements:

12 57
24 116

Python 2.6.1 on Mac OS X gives:

14 58
27 115

Python 2.6.3 on Windows XP gives:

19 71
36 154

Such a need being quite common, I suspect I did something wrong. Any idea?

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