Hovertext Character Width

I'm working on a HUD project, using tiny prims with hovertext to display dynamic text. Pretty standard stuff.

The client asked me if I could make the text left-justified instead of centered. I said unfortunately no, that's just the nature of hovertext.

But...then my geek sense started tingling.

Actually it would be possible; given the proportional width of the characters, you could calculate the physical width of the text and shift the prim accordingly

Fortunately I was smart enough not to share this little insight with the client just yet

Can anyone think of a practical way to glean this data?

Wouldn't it just be easier to pad the right side with spaces? Admittedly, that's going to burn up available characters...

It's a proportional font; you'd still have to know how wide the characters being displayed are.

i think its the same font as the script editor window, if it is that makes life easy since its a (8?) point monospace font

There is a copy of FontFont Meta somewhere in the SL viewer folder, you could toss that into a font editor to dig out the metrics. Might be easier just to print out repeated strings of characters and measure from there. Remember that the UI size slider changes the size of llSetText too, so you'll want to do this relative to the rest of the text rather than the prims.

But this is still going to leave the possibility of jagged margins, because there's at least one viewer already in circulation that doesn't use that font (licensing issues), so the metrics aren't something you can count on.


That would have been nice but LL went with their proportional font there :/

at least with space padding, you're only having to do one calculation, and dont ALSO have to worry about the pixels-to-meters issue.

Yeah, you would kind of have to do it that way, because of the UI scaling problem.

Hmm. Does the UI scaling also affect the rendered size of HUD attachments? Since the text is also centered on the prim, the width of the prims could possibly be used to help (though if the wearer has to be able to click past the text they could get in the way). Might be worth a try.

Nope