Over the last few days I have been playing with the Region property of a Form. As part of this I created a TextShapedForm that took on the shape of a string passed in on the constructor. Below is the code to shape the Form:
public void ShapeFormToString(string textShape)
{
int lineSpacing; // font family line spacing in design units
int ascent; // the height of the font without line padding.
float pixelsBetween; // ;space between lines in pixels
// Create a GraphicsPath object.
GraphicsPath graphicsPath = new GraphicsPath();
// Set up the font.
FontFamily fontFamily = new FontFamily("Arial");
FontStyle fontStyle = FontStyle.Bold;
int emSize = 250;
Font font = new Font(fontFamily, emSize, fontStyle, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
Font = font; // set the font property
// Determining the space between lines
lineSpacing = fontFamily.GetLineSpacing(fontStyle);
ascent = fontFamily.GetCellAscent(fontStyle);
pixelsBetween =
font.Size * (ascent-lineSpacing) / fontFamily.GetEmHeight(fontStyle)
+ SystemInformation.CaptionHeight + SystemInformation.BorderSize.Height
;
// ;Move the starting point up so that it is positioned in the top right
// of the client area (not inserting any space between lines)
PointF pointF = new PointF(0,
pixelsBetween +
SystemInformation.CaptionHeight + SystemInformation.BorderSize.Height
);
// Add the string to the graphics path.
graphicsPath.AddString("Itron",
fontFamily,
(int)fontStyle,
emSize,
pointF, new StringFormat());
GraphicsPath = graphicsPath;
// Set the region to the shape of the text
this.Region = new Region(graphicsPath);
}
As part of the process I also found the method that can return the size of a text string given the font. Check out MeasureString() method on the System.Drawing.Graphics class. The only drawback to this method is that I don't seem to be able to get hold of a Form's Graphic class from anywhere outside of the Paint event delegate.
A second thing I learned about was ascent and line spacing on fonts. The MSDN diagram below demonstrates these concepts the best.
Using this you can obviously determine the amount of space above a character. This is what I do in the "Determining the space between lines" code snippet above.
One last note, check Shaped .NET Windows Forms article by Markus Egger. (DevX may only enable you to see this as a Premier Club member but I found that if I refreshed enough times or accessed if from the CoDe Magazine site it worked.) Markus uses VB code and he hard codes his form size but none-the-less, it provides a good foundation for working with Form Regions and shaped forms.
12:33:58 AM
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