Is there anyway to get the size of the text in a JTextArea?

The title pretty much says it all. What I don’t mean is how to get the size of the JTextArea. I need to get the size of the actual text. I am completely open to suggestions though. If you have a wonky workaround that involves using something other than JTextArea but still has a similar effect, I’d love to hear it. Thanks!

Answer

If you want to get the size of the Font then you can use:

JTextArea area = new JTextArea();
Font font = area.getFont();
int fontSize = font.getSize();

Alternatively if you set the font of the text area yourself you’ll know before hand what the font size is, for example:

Font font = new Font("Dialog", Font.PLAIN, 12);
area.setFont(font);

And if that wasn’t actually the question and instead you want to know how big certain parts of the font are in pixels you can use a FontMetrics object for the font.

FontMetrics fontMetrics = area.getFontMetrics(font);

Using the FontMetrics object you should be able to find out everything related to the size and distances in a font. You can find more information on how you can use the FontMetrics object here: Javanotes, Measuring Text.

I hope this helps 🙂

Note: This applies to Swing, if you’re using a different kind of TextArea the answer will be different.