Suggestion for Improvement: Layouting Text Drawables

While programmatically laying out views, I encountered the following issue:

Unlike TextArea and Bitmap, which have their width and height properties populated upon instantiation, a Text drawable does not provide valid dimensions until after it has been drawn. Moreover, if the text content changes, the updated dimensions are only reflected after the next draw cycle. As far as I can tell, this behavior is undocumented and makes it difficult to perform layout calculations in advance.

I suspect the root cause is that the text width can only be calculated with access to a valid Dc (drawing context).

Proposed Improvements

1. Introduce a Graphics method to calculate text width without a Dc
   The Graphics module already provides functions for retrieving font height. It would be highly beneficial to add a method like Graphics.getTextWidth(font, text) that returns the width of the text in pixels and works independently of a Dc. Currently, my workaround is to create a 1-pixel BufferedBitmap just to obtain a valid Dc, which feels like an unnecessary hack. I assume the SDK has more efficient means internally to determine text width without requiring a drawing context.

2. Populate Text dimensions immediately on text updates
   The Text drawable should use this functionality to populate its width and height properties as soon as the text is set or updated. This would allow developers to query layout-relevant dimensions immediately, without relying on post-draw state.