Hello everybody,

I've been trying to dynamically re-size a frame, according to what font
I wish to use in it. I first create a new Font () class, with whatever
font I want (in my case, "Monospace". Then I wish to make the frame 80
characters wide, but I am not quite sure how to do this, since the only
way I currently know is to pass an 80 character long string to
Font.getStringBounds (), along with an instance of the
FontRenderContext class. But the only way I have of getting an instance
of this FontRenderContext class is to get it from a Graphics object,
which I only access in a JPanel, that I add to my JFrame. So basically
I cannot get the width of an 80 characters long string until I have
created a JPanel to add to my JFrame, which is too late for resizing.
Here's some code:

class myFrame extends JFrame {
   public myFrame () {
       myPanel aPanel = new myPanel ();
       this.getContentPane ().add (aPanel);
   }

   void setS (int x, int y) { // otherwise myPanel calls its own
setSize ()
       setSize (x, y);
   }

   private class myPanel extends JPanel { // so I can access setSize
()
       public void paintComponent (Graphics g) {
           super.paintComponent (g);
           Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
           Font aFont = new Font ("Monospace", Font.PLAIN, 12);
           g2.setFont (aFont);
           FontRenderContext context = g2.getFontRenderContext ();
           Rectangle2D rect = aFont.getStringBounds ("[80
characters]", context);
           int height = (int) rect.getHeight ();
           int width = (int) rect.getWidth ();
           setS (width,  50 * height); // doesn't work
       }
   }
}

So basically I don't know how to access a Graphics object in the JFrame
object, so that I can call getFontRenderContext, and calculate the
length of the string and all that.
Please note that I am beginning Java, and have not been programming in
this language for very long at all ;-).

Thanks a lot in advance for any help!

- Joseph Paterson