Alignment of Text

Question

I have a JList which show different attributes values of a item in a line.
I am trying to align each of the attributes to follow in the same vertical alignment. To do so, I used "\t"
but I am facing some problem, is that as the length of the attributes might varies (especially one of my attributes is a string which the length might varies drastically) so it doesn't work properly. In addition, each of the character has different width, is there any way we could find the total width of a string? Is there any other solutions?

Answer 1

Get the maximum width
public int CalculateWidth(Component component){
   FontMetrics fm;
   int width; 
   String label;
   fm = fComponent.getFontMetrics(component.getFont());
   width = 0;
   for(int i = 0; i < component.getModel().getSize(); i++) {
        label = (String)component.getModel().getElementAt(i);
        if (width> fm.stringWidth(label))
          width = fm.stringWidth(label);
   return width;
}