OK - Since my other question seems to be drawing a blank...

Does anyone know how to calculate the widths of characters in non-fixed width fonts?

If I can figure out the widths, I can figure out how many lines my label will have and somehow figure out from that where to place my graphic.

Mike
EchoVue.com

__________________
Mike
EchoVue.com

What you want to find out is the characters per inch or per centimeter for a particular font. For that, you'll have to do a Google search for someone who has done that for popular fonts (e.g. Time New Roman, Arial). If not, you'll have to do some experimentation yourself.

You'd pick a font size. That determines height. For font sizes, 72 points = 1 inch in height. Once you pick a font type and size (say Times New Roman 12-point) then you'll have to print out a page of A through Z, a through z, 0 through 9, and some symbols to see how many print horizontally per inch. For example.

AAAAAAAAAAA
BBBBBBBBBBB
CCCCCCCCCCC

Etc. Then you'll see for the A's, how many characters per inch (CPI) print. For the B's, C's, etc. Once you have the CPIs calculated and stored in a table, you can then predict how wide a label will be by calculating its width using the MID function.

Dim bytWidth as Byte, bytCount as Byte

bytWidth = 0
For bytCount = 1 to Len(Me.lblMyLabel.Caption)
    bytWidth = bytWidth + Nz(DLookUp("[bytCPI]", _
    "tblCPI", "[strChar] = '" & _
    Mid(Me.lblMyLabel.Caption, i) & "'"), 0)
Next bytCount

Where lblMyLabel is the caption in your report (use your real name instead).

You'd need a table called tblCPI with two fields: strChar (holds the character, e.g. "A", "B", etc.) and bytCPI (holds the characters per inch value for that character).


Greg Serrano
Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division

Ingenious!! I'll give it a whirl.

Thanks

Mike

Mike
EchoVue.com

sounds to me like you'd need to store Inches per Character instead of Characters per Inch in order for bytWidth to give you an actual length. What do you think?

"Life is a Database"

Yes, you're right... inches per character (IPC) is what you want. When I think too fast, I often get things backwards. D'oh! Sorry about that. Thanks for catching that.


Greg Serrano
Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality, Air Quality Division

True - I realize this when the program told me that my two lines were several hundred inch's long!! The basic idea however was dead on. Once I got a few of the bugs worked out, it worked perfectly. I am sure that my measurements weren't exact, so I could probably revisit them again in the future, and I did run into a problem trying to figure out the space taken by a space, but I put the space value into the Nz function default, and it picked it right up.

Thanks to Greg I have a whole bunch of happy users now!!

Mike

Mike
EchoVue.com

%widths = (' ' => 200, '!' => 254, '"' => 444, '#' => 644, '$' => 536, '%' => 719, '&' => 796, ''' => 235, '(' => 304, ')' => 304, '*' => 416, '+' => 533, ',' => 217, '-' => 294, '.' => 216, '/' => 273,
'0' => 533, '1' => 533, '2' => 533, '3' => 533, '4' => 533, '5' => 533, '6' => 533, '7' => 533, '8' => 533, '9' => 533,
':' => 216, ';' => 217, '<' => 533, '=' => 533, '>' => 533, '?' => 361, '@' => 757,
'A' => 724, 'B' => 598, 'C' => 640, 'D' => 750, 'E' => 549, 'F' => 484, 'G' => 720, 'H' => 742, 'I' => 326, 'J' => 315, 'K' => 678, 'L' => 522, 'M' => 835,
'N' => 699, 'O' => 779, 'P' => 532, 'Q' => 779, 'R' => 675, 'S' => 536, 'T' => 596, 'U' => 722, 'V' => 661, 'W' => 975, 'X' => 641, 'Y' => 641, 'Z' => 684,
'[' => 342, '\' => 273, ']' => 342, '^' => 247, '_' => 475, '`' => 247,
'a' => 441, 'b' => 540, 'c' => 448, 'd' => 542, 'e' => 466, 'f' => 321, 'g' => 479, 'h' => 551, 'i' => 278, 'j' => 268, 'k' => 530, 'l' => 269, 'm' => 833,
'n' => 560, 'o' => 554, 'p' => 549, 'q' => 534, 'r' => 398, 's' => 397, 't' => 340, 'u' => 542, 'v' => 535, 'w' => 818, 'x' => 527, 'y' => 535, 'z' => 503,
'{' => 380, '|' => 265, '}' => 380, '~' => 533, '€' => 533, '‚' => 235, '„' => 444, '…' => 950, '†' => 536, '‡' => 536, '‰' => 1096, '‹' => 256, 'Ś' => 964,
'Ź' => 536, '‘' => 235, '’' => 235, '“' => 444, '”' => 444, '•' => 536, '–' => 475, '—' => 950, '›' => 256, 'ś' => 813, 'ź' => 641, 'Ł' => 536, 'Ą' => 536,
'§' => 536, '«' => 399, '¬' => 521, '­' => 294, 'Ż' => 533, '°' => 294, '±' => 533, 'ł' => 380, '´' => 247, 'µ' => 524, 'ą' => 380, '»' => 399, '˝' => 760,
'ż' => 361, 'Ć' => 941, 'Ę' => 549, 'Ń' => 699, 'Ó' => 779, 'ć' => 703, 'ę' => 466, 'ń' => 560, 'ó' => 554, '÷' => 533);

This is relational character table specially for font: Arial 10pt.
'.' => 1, 'a' => 1.73, 'b' => 1.8, 'c' => 1.51, 'd' => 1.8, 'e' => 1.73, 'f' => 1.05, 'g' => 1.8, 'h' => 1.82, 'i' => 0.78, 'j' => 0.93, 'k' => 1.64, 'l' => 0.78,
'ł' => 0.93, 'm' => 2.73, 'n' => 1.82, 'o' => 1.78, 'p' => 1.8, 'r' => 1.2, 's' => 1.45, 't' => 1.11, 'u' => 1.82, 'w' => 2.91, 'x' => 1.62, 'y' => 1.64, 'z' => 1.45,
'0' => 1.78, '1' => 1.78, '2' => 1.78, '3' => 1.78, '4' => 1.78, '5' => 1.78, '6' => 1.78, '7' => 1.78, '8' => 1.78, '9' => 1.78, 'A' => 1.96, 'B' => 1.91, 'C' => 1.96,
'D' => 2.2, 'E' => 1.84, 'F' => 1.71, 'G' => 2.18, 'H' => 2.2, 'I' => 1.22, 'J' => 1.36, 'Ł' => 1.69, 'K' => 1.91, 'L' => 1.63, 'M' => 2.51, 'N' => 2.16, 'O' => 2.31,
'P' => 1.8, 'R' => 2.02, 'S' => 1.82, 'T' => 2.09, 'U' => 2.15, 'W' => 2.93, 'X' => 1.91, 'Y' => 1.89, 'Z' => 1.82, '(' => 1.2, ')' => 1.2, '-' => 1.2, '–' => 1.8,
'—' => 2.93, 'nbsp' => 1.11,