d_stranz, thanks for your reply!

I am INDEED having a QFont problem, right in the area your response focused on. This is my own application-level mistake ... the string is actually our own generated CSS Font Declaration thingy ... e.g. "font: italic medium 30px Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;" ... for which we, unfortunately, don't have a way to generate the original QFont. But the point here is that, nope, I cannot use that string in a call to QFont::fromString (const QString& descrip).

[Wouldn't in be great to have heuristic CSS font declaration encoding/decoding support in QFont !]

Sorry about the confusion of the initial disembodied statements. QFont _labelFont (and also QRectF _labelRect) are fields in my QGraphicsItem subclass, and the related statements appear elsewhere in that class.

To clarify, in fact, Calling QPainter::setFont() within a QGraphicsItem::paint() implementation — with a VALID QFont instance — IS WORKING for me. Thank you.

I had cross posted on the Qt Project Forum, on which there were also useful responses. SEE: https://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/47233/

- Phil