At one time (and maybe still), Font understood #widthOfString: .
An idea (that I've used elsewhere) is to iterate over the values you actually have in the list for the font you are using to determine the size. This makes sure it works - but will change (and maybe need to be re-done with each change to the inspector list).
Alternatively, you could run this for a reasonable sampling of characters and take the average of the widths, and use that result as the 'standard' pixel width?
Just some ideas,
cbc