I got a relatively easy question - but I cannot find anything anywhere to answer it.

I use a simple SWT table widget in my application that displays only text in the cells. I got an incremental search feature and want to highlight text snippets in all cells if they match.

So when typing "a", all "a"s should be highlighted.

To get this, I add an SWT.EraseItem listener to interfere with the background drawing. If the current cell's text contains the search string, I find the positions and calculate relative x-coordinates within the text using event.gc.stringExtent - easy.

With that I just draw rectangles "behind" the occurrences.

Now, there's a flaw in this. The table does not draw the text without a margin, so my x coordinate does not really match - it is slightly off by a few pixels! But how many?? Where do I retrieve the cell's text margins that table's own drawing will use? No clue. Cannot find anything. :-(

Bonus question: the table's draw method also shortens text and adds "..." if it does not fit into the cell. Hmm. My occurrence finder takes the TableItem's text and thus also tries to mark occurrences that are actually not visible because they are consumed by the "...". How do I get the shortened text and not the "real" text within the EraseItem draw handler?

Thanks!