Qt – QLabel auto multiple lines

The best and recommended way is to use Qt Style Sheet.

To change the text color and background color of a QLabel, here is what I would do :

QLabel* pLabel = new QLabel;
pLabel->setStyleSheet("QLabel { background-color : red; color : blue; }");

You could also avoid using Qt Style Sheets and change the QPalette colors of your QLabel, but you might get different results on different platforms and/or styles.

As Qt documentation states :

Using a QPalette isn't guaranteed to work for all styles, because style authors are restricted by the different platforms' guidelines and by the native theme engine.

But you could do something like this :

 QPalette palette = ui->pLabel->palette();
 palette.setColor(ui->pLabel->backgroundRole(), Qt::yellow);
 palette.setColor(ui->pLabel->foregroundRole(), Qt::yellow);
 ui->pLabel->setPalette(palette);

But as I said, I strongly suggest not to use the palette and go for Qt Style Sheet.

To get the precise pixel-width of the text, you must use QFontMetrics.boundingRect.

Do not use QFontMetrics.width, because it takes into account the left and right bearing of the characters. This will often (but not always) lead to results which can be several pixels more or less than the full pixel-width.

So, to calculate the pixel-width of the label text, use something like:

width = label.fontMetrics().boundingRect(label.text()).width()

EDIT

There are three different QFontMetrics methods which can be used to calculate the "width" of a string: size(), width() and boundingRect().

However, although they all give slightly different results, none of them seems to consistently return the exact pixel-width in all circumstances. Which one is best depends mostly on the current font-family in use and on which particular characters are at the beginning and end of the string.

I have added below a script that tests the three methods. For me, the boundingRect method gives the most consistent results. The other two methods tend to be either slightly too wide, or clip the second text sample when a serif font is used (this is with PyQt 4.9 and Qt 4.8 on Linux).

from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore

class Window(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self)
        self.setAutoFillBackground(True)
        self.setBackgroundRole(QtGui.QPalette.Mid)
        self.setLayout(QtGui.QFormLayout(self))
        self.fonts = QtGui.QFontComboBox(self)
        self.fonts.currentFontChanged.connect(self.handleFontChanged)
        self.layout().addRow('font:', self.fonts)
        for text in (
            u'H\u2082SO\u2084 + Be',
            u'jib leaf jib leaf',
            ):
            for label in ('boundingRect', 'width', 'size'):
                field = QtGui.QLabel(text, self)
                field.setStyleSheet('background-color: yellow')
                field.setAlignment(QtCore.Qt.AlignCenter)
                self.layout().addRow(label, field)
        self.handleFontChanged(self.font())

    def handleFontChanged(self, font):
        layout = self.layout()
        font.setPointSize(20)
        metrics = QtGui.QFontMetrics(font)
        for index in range(1, layout.rowCount()):
            field = layout.itemAt(index, QtGui.QFormLayout.FieldRole).widget()
            label = layout.itemAt(index, QtGui.QFormLayout.LabelRole).widget()
            method = label.text().split(' ')[0]
            text = field.text()
            if method == 'width':
                width = metrics.width(text)
            elif method == 'size':
                width = metrics.size(field.alignment(), text).width()
            else:
                width = metrics.boundingRect(text).width()
            field.setFixedWidth(width)
            field.setFont(font)
            label.setText('%s (%d):' % (method, width))

if __name__ == '__main__':

    import sys
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    window.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())