Is there a simple way to calculate a bounding box for a string?

1

I’m using SpriteBatch.DrawString(...) to render some text, and I’d like to first draw a background underneath it.

Is there a way to calculate the bounding box of a to-be-rendered text with a specific font?

2

Try SpriteFont.MeasureString on you font.

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3

So something like

Vector2 size = myfont.MesureString("my text");
Rectangle area = new Rectangle((int)pos.X, (int)pos.Y, (int)size.X, (int)size.Y);
spriteBatch.Draw(mybackground, area, Color.White);
spriteBatch.DrawString(myfont, "my text", pos, Color.White);

Also you would be better to use Convert.ToInt32 than (int) as (int)will remove any decimal value.

4

You mean Convert.ToInt32 will round and casting to int will just truncate the fractional part, right? Because that sentence is a bit confusing.

5

Yea that’s what I mean, Must have not had my morning coffee when I wrote that.

6

MeasureString is very costly, so you should cache this value if the string is constant between frames.
If you use a string to display the damages over the target for ex like in Diablo3, it is definitely too costly each frame as many string should be displayed. Caching is the future :slight_smile:

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