Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!sequoia!rpp386!woody
From: woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Determining the proper BoundingBox ??
Summary: font bounding boxes
Keywords: Postscript programs, BoundingBox comment
Message-ID: <17283@rpp386.cactus.org>
Date: 13 Nov 89 12:57:14 GMT
References: <3094@husc6.harvard.edu> <5553@ubc-cs.UUCP> <7893@cg-atla.UUCP> <1434@adobe.UUCP>
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Plano, TX
Lines: 23


There is a related topic to bounding boxes.  I have tried without success to
get the bounding box for a font.  I must be doing something wrong, because the
documentation in the red-book just doesnot seem to work for me.  The problem is
converting a proportional spaced font (like Times-Roman) to a  monospaced font.
Yeah, I know, why on earth would I want to do this?  Well, A client is paying me
good money to solve a problem for him.  His requirement is that he be able to
print any font in mono-mode so that the old software that he has will work
correctly.  I have written a COMPLETE Diablo emulator for him, and sofar have
done the mono-stuff the hard way.  It is realy to slow to compute each character
width, and then subtract it from the cell width, divide diff by 2 and move that
amount before printing the character, but that is the way I had to do it.  The
books imply that you can change the character widths of a font, and so you can.
Unfortunaly Adobe does not center proportional characters within the font  
bounding box, so one has to alter the sidebearing info.  I can only find
a fleeting mention that the metrics entry can be a matrix either 1 or 2
elements wide.  There is also a passing hint that given the font bounding
box, and the char bounding box one can somehow compute a sidebearing.  I
have had no luck doing either.  Can anyone shed some light on this, and
possibly post a fragment of code (Hello Adobe....)  I'd surely appreciate
this.

Cheers, Woody