And now for something completely different. The following assumes arial font, and makes a wild guess based on a linear interpolation of character vs width.
// Returns the size in PICA of the string, given space is 200 and 'W' is 1000.
// see https://p2p.wrox.com/access/32197-calculate-character-widths.html
static int picaSize(String s)
{
// the following characters are sorted by width in Arial font
String lookup = " .:,;'^`!|jl/\\i-()JfIt[]?{}sr*a\"ce_gFzLxkP+0123456789<=>~qvy$SbduEphonTBCXY#VRKZN%GUAHD@OQ&wmMW";
int result = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); ++i)
{
int c = lookup.indexOf(s.charAt(i));
result += (c < 0 ? 60 : c) * 7 + 200;
}
return result;
}
Interesting, but perhaps not very practical.