In my app I am displaying a table where the individual cells are editable text fields (i.e. EditText objects). I am currently struggling calculating appropriate widths for these.
If I set the width to be as many "Ems" as the displayed text has characters, my fields are much to wide by about a factor of 2 and the table looks ugly and wastes lots of precious screen space. Setting the width in "Ems" is essentially like assuming the worst case, i.e. the width of a string under the assumption that it contains only the broadest characters in a font, usually 'M' (hence the name of the method), 'm', 'W', or '_'). But on average strings contain narrower characters and so most of these fields are half empty and much too wide for their actual content. I am thus desperately seeking a way to calculate a better fitting width, not that worst case width.
The "normal" way to do this in Java (in AWT or Swing at least) is to asks a widget's current Font (actually a Font's FontMetrics), to calculate and return the width that will be necessary to display a given string in pixels. But how does one obtain a TextView's Font? I haven't found any method to obtain a (Text)View's font and/or calculate a more appropriate width given the actual content of a cell's text string. How does one do that in Android?
Michael