Character widths

Anyone have a formula for finding the width of a string of characters measured in ems? I am having difficulties getting dynamic menus to render properly. I have been playing with using a runtime calculation on the length of the string, but will only work with monospace fonts. I am not that familiar with typesetting, and was hoping someone could give me some pointers.

Thans in advance!

-Jeff

you can't do that..

there are no rules for different fonts..

and the user might not have the font you are using, or have a different version of the same font..


anyway, for making menus you shouldn't need to use that.. post a code (or even better, a link to the demo), so i can help you better..

It's an attempt at using CSS to do the menuing... rather than JS. I have it on an internal site at the moment. I will get something up on an externally viewable page c. 3:30p EDT. (I am at work).

What I am looking for is the em width in general for certain characters. I know that i renders smaller than W in proportional fonts, and that it won't be precise...

It isn't the perfect answer, I understand, but it should be a lot closer than any other options that I have tried so far...

Thanks for the help...

why don't you let DIV elements size themself?

The menus will fall (absolute positioning) outside the parents. I am using UL/LI tags, with a little help from http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/.

You can see the test page that I am using with links to the sources at: http://jeff.caughel.net/test/