How to resize a button depending on its text

Question

Hey all,

In the process of translating an application with C# + Winforms, I need to change a button's text depending on the language.

My problem is the following :

Let's say I want to translate a button from "Hi all!" to "Bonjour tout le monde" !

As you can guess, the button's size won't be the same if I enter english text or french one... My question is "simple", how can I manage to resize the button on the fly so the text fits its content in the button ?

So far I got something like that !

[Hi all!]

[Bonjour]

Thanks in advance for your help !

Andy

Answer 1

You might try MeasureString:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.graphics.measurestring.aspx

Answer 2

Resizing is easy. You can just set the button's width. The trick is making it big enough to fit your text.

   using(Graphics cg =  this.CreateGraphics())
   {
       SizeF size = cg.MeasureString("Please excuse my dear aunt sally",this.button1.Font);
       size.Width+= 3; //add some padding
       this.button1.Width = (int)size.Width;

       this.button1.Text = "Please excuse my dear aunt sally";
   }

Answer 3

There's absolutely no need to use the Graphics object as the other posters have said.

If you set the button's 'AutoSize' property to true, the 'AutoSizeMode' to 'GrowAndShrink', and the 'AutoEllipsis' to 'false', it will resize automatically to fit the text.

That being said, you may need to make several layout adjustments to make this change fit into your UI. You can adjust the button's padding to add space around the text, and you may want to place your buttons in a TableLayout panel (or something) to stop them from overlapping when they resize.