Ninth Wave

When I use DrawString for say a short string

"hello"

It seems fine, but if I extend the string to something like

"hello how are you what is your name"

the spacing between the characters of all the letters starts to change. Is there any way to make it stay the same? Regardless of the length of the string.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

passel

Choose a fixed width font, like Courier, for example.

Ninth Wave

Thanks, that does work.

Do you know how I could get it to work with other fonts, even Verdana?

AtmaWeapon

There's no way to make Verdana render characters with a fixed width. It is a font designed to calculate the optimum spacing for each character as it renders. This changes in various situations; for example, the "f" in "food" has to be farther from the "o" than the first "f" in "buffalo" must be from the next. If you zoom in close, you'll even see that "ff" is connected in some fonts. The reasoning involves a lot of discussion about readability.

Fixed width fonts don't do that. Every letter is always the same single width.

To me, a more interesting question is, "Why does it matter to you?" Since this is normal behavior for fonts like Verdana, why are you trying to change it? What are you doing?

hDC_0

Just so this thread gets meta-tagged properly...

When we talk about variable spacing between letters/characters
of proportional fonts it's called kerning
(or less commonly called mortising),
with the root word "kern" denoting the part of a type letter that overhangs the edge of the type block,
and the word "kern" is generally thought to be derived from the French word "carne" meaning corner.

You can read more about algorithmic versus table-based kerning here.

To search for fixed width fonts you can also use the term "monospaced" fonts,
which is one of the ways that fonts are sub-divided on this
Wikipedia "List of typefaces" page.

Programmatically determining which fonts are fixed width is not exactly slam-dunk easy using .Net with GDI/GDI+,
but I do have a couple bookmarked offsite threads:
1.) a social.msdn thread concerning:
"How do you determine if a given font family is a fixed-pitch?"
2.) a stackoverflow thread entitled:
"How do I get all installed fixed-width fonts?"

There is also a .Net method (Graphics.MeasureString), that can can measure the specified string when drawn with the specified font.
This thread gives some sample VB.Net DrawString code for using the method.
If you are trying to design some kind of multi-line "smart label" that also takes into account character's height then this thread might be of interest (the link to lebb's offsite final solution is given in the last post).

Besides Courier/Courier New, Lucida Console and Lucida Sans Typewriter are two of the other Windows fixed width fonts that are fairly widely used.
This page lists all fonts included with Windows from Win98 through Vista.
The Windows 7 included fonts are listed here.

Of course, Consolas is the popular fixed width semi-default font for .Net but
there has been a discussion of other fonts for use in .Net here.

Ninth Wave

Thanks for your info.
I am writing something akin to a console where the user types commands, and using DrawString to do it.
This means that as the user is typing, what they have already typed keeps shifting and makes it weird.

If there is a better way to print text to a form I'd like to hear it.

Thankyou very much hDC_0

hDC_0

Have you looked at pInvoking TextOut or ExtTextOut?
It's pretty crude, though, in terms of not really being able to control kerning without a lot of extra coding.

According to his article, "Rendering Text Using the .NET Framework",
another alternative is to use the TextRender Class.

It has a DrawText method and you can:
Of course if you are going to use TextRendering you want to make sure the
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault is set correctly.

Have you looked at the bobpowell article, "Formatting text on a common baseline"?
It gives an example of using the StringFormat class to measure the string length.

I also found a social.msdn thread discussing of TextRenderer.MeasureText versus MeasureCharacterRanges.

It should also be noted that when using "AntiAlias" member for the TextRenderingHint Enumeration:
..but I don't know if this has an effect on kerning or ligatures.

PlausiblyDamp

The easiest solution is don't use a variable width font if you don't want variable width on the text rendering. Fonts like Consolas are designed with this in mind.

AtmaWeapon

Yeah, every console replacement I've used tends to either:

• Only show a small list of well-known fixed-width fonts
• Warn you that not all fonts look pretty.

I've noticed some oddball variance in the kerning of similar strings like hDC_0 talked about, but never found a solution. You might consider trying one of the overloads of DrawString() that takes a bounding rectangle and a StringFormat; playing with those might get you a more consistent experience when using variable-width fonts. But the fact remains that fixed-width fonts are best for consoles.

DrPunk

TextRenderer gets you much closer results to how controls draw their text than DrawString does, I've found.

It's worth noting that TextRenderer.DrawText using Points doesn't work on Windows 2000. Always best to use the method that requires Rectangle.