QLabels have same width regardless of text?

[hsetlik]

So I have a QHBoxLayout that gets filled with instances of a subclass of QLabel. I want the spaces between one label's text and the next to all be the same, so I wrap the QHBoxLayout in a widget and try to limit that widget's width to a sum of each label's widths which was calculated when the labels were constructed prior to being added to any layout:

//instantiate the labels
int fullWidth = 0;
for(auto& word : words)
{
    auto label = new WordListLabel(word, this);
    fullWidth += label->width();
    wordListHBox->addWidget(label);
}
//wrap the layout in a widget
auto wordListWidget = new QWidget(this);
wordListWidget->setLayout(wordListHBox);
wordListWidget->setMaximumWidth(fullWidth);

Stepping through this in the debugger I found that every label, regardless of its text, is being instantiated with a width of 100. Is there some setting I have to adjust to get the labels to be sized based on the length of their text? Or is this just the wrong way to go about evenly spacing text in a QHBoxLayout? Any insight much appreciated.

[Christian Ehrlicher]

You should try sizeHint() - since the widget is not shown yet, the width is a default value.

[hsetlik]

You mean setting the label's sizeHint()?

[Christian Ehrlicher]

You can't set a sizeHint()... you should use it.

[JoeCFD]

use font to get bounding box of each word
auto rect = QFontMetrics( font() ).boundingRect( word );
its label->setFixedWidth( rect.width() );
Then all labels with different width will have the same spacing.

[eyllanesc]

@hsetlik try with: wordListWidget->setFixedWidth(wordListWidget->sizeHint().width());

[hsetlik]

Sorry- where do you mean I should use it?

[eyllanesc]

@hsetlik replace wordListWidget->setMaximumWidth(fullWidth);

[hsetlik]

@eyllanesc Oh I see, it's working now. Thank you!