Reading TrueType Font character widths including kerning

Question

Okay, here it is: Since getStringBounds() and stringWidth() deliver incredible unprecise values and Sun apparently doesn't really care to fix this, I need to read the kerning information of a true type font manually.
What I have is a field that is formatted as "width is 3.5cm" and its content is "Yo folks, this rocks" or something like that. What I need to do now is to measure whether the text (the content) really matches the field's size (3.5cm) or needs to be wrapped or cut.
getStringBounds() and stringWidth() simply delivers crap as results, since Sun's rasterizer apparently completely ignores the kerning information and simply counts the character widths together (see: http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=20&thread=421610).
So, does anyone have a clue on how to read TTF fonts directly and measure a font using the information that is already contained in the TTF file? And please, I know that Sun's rasterizer is system independant, but that' doesn't help me any single bit and waiting for Sun to perfect their rasterizer is out of question as well.
I shall award the author of the best clue or hint into the right direction (hey, after all, maybe I oversaw something (nope, setting KEY_FRACTIONALMETRICS doesn't count, that still returns the wrong results, although they're better and more precise than without them <g>)) with ten Duke bucks.
Thanks a lot (and sorry for the language)

Answer 1

I have a starnge feeling that this may be partly to do with the size
of the font you are using. For Ariel plain I got the following size
10 point=     374
This is the actaul width of the text (in pixels) as displayed.
My monitor is 78.818 dpi. so converting this to 72 dpi = 341.65
at 96 dpi this is 455.5.
The following code was used (It shows the mouse position)
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.text.*;
public class Fonts extends JFrame{
  private static final String text =
"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";
  JTextPane jtf;
  StyledDocument doc;
  public Fonts(int pSize) {
    super();
    doc = new DefaultStyledDocument();
    jtf =new JTextPane(doc);
    jtf.setText(text);
    Font f = new Font("Ariel",Font.PLAIN,pSize);
    jtf.setFont(f);
    getContentPane().add(jtf);
    jtf.addMouseMotionListener(new MouseMotionAdapter(){
        public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent me) {
          System.out.println(me.getX()+" "+getY());
    setSize(800,600);
  public JTextPane getTextPane() {
    return jtf;
  public static void main(String[] args) {
     Fonts f = null;
     try {
       f = new Fonts(Integer.parseInt(args[0]));
       f.setVisible(true);
     }catch(Exception e) {
        System.out.println("Please enter a valid point size");
        System.exit(1);
    try{
     Rectangle start = f.getTextPane().modelToView(0);
     Rectangle end = f.getTextPane().modelToView(text.length());
     System.out.println("point size "+args[0]+"\t"+(end.getX()-start.getX()));
    }catch(Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
}matfud