With any new version of the Qt toolkit comes some clean-up of its APIs to keep it clean, consistent, and future-proof. Part of this clean-up is to rename API functions to make it more clear what they actually do.
Starting with Qt 5.11, the QFontMetrics::width() function was deprecated. You could still compile code that uses this function, but since it is marked obsolete, you were encouraged to port away from it.
So what is unclear or not consistent about it? The function name and signature suggest that you can retrieve the width of a text string (or single character) taking into account the metrics of a specific font. Such metrics are needed to create widget layouts that automatically adapt to user specified fonts or different system display DPIs.
Reading the API description, the result is actually not the width. The graphics shown at https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qfontmetrics-obsolete.html#width illustrates that there is a difference between the horizontal advance, i.e. the number of pixels from one character to the next character, and the bounding rectangle width, which is needed to encompass all pixels including so called bearings that can overlap the next or the previous character.
Since it was not clear from the confusingly named function QFontMetrics::width() that it actually returned the horizontal advance, instead of the bounding width, this method is now obsolete. You must port to either QFontMetrics::horizontalAdvance() or QFontMetrics::boundingRect().width().
Please make sure you are aware of the difference, and do not port blindly. I am pretty sure that in most cases QFontMetrics::boundingRect() is what you want, unless you are writing custom text shaping/layouting code. Using the wrong function can cause clipped text or text that suddenly wraps to the next line despite calculating the width that it needs.
Keeping Computing Personal 