Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!decwrl!adobe!heaven!glenn
From: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: limitcheck in flattenpath
Message-ID: <320@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Date: 13 Nov 90 00:01:37 GMT
References: <1642@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>
Reply-To: glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid)
Organization: RightBrain Software, Woodside, CA
Lines: 39

In article <1642@umriscc.isc.umr.edu> jmd@ee.umr.edu (Jim Dumser) writes:
>I've been trying to hand code some figures in postscript, but I keep getting
>limitcheck errors in flattenpath when trying to center text.  It doesn't
>happen for all strings; only for longer strings.  Basically, my routine to
>center text calls 'hiwi':
>
>/hiwi {gsave newpath 0 0 moveto true charpath flattenpath pathbbox 4 2 roll
>pop pop grestore} def

Your code is fine; you're just hitting an implementation limit (the number
of path elements allowed in the current path).  The only workaround is to
have fewer elements in the path.  There are a couple of ways to do this.
One is to use "forall" to do "flattenpath pathbbox" on each element of the
string and then to accumulate the bounding box for the whole string.  A bit
of work, fairly messy, but it should work for arbitrarily long strings.

There are two other possibilities, assuming you're just centering text and
can tolerate slight errors in the bounding boxes (there are probably slight
errors anyway).  One is to omit the "flattenpath" altogether.  This will mean
that some of the control points on the bezier curves get included in the
bounding box, but it should still center things quite reasonably.  The
other possibility is to increase the flatness parameter before you call
flattenpath, like this:

/hiwi { %def
    gsave
	newpath 0 0 moveto false charpath	% you should use "false"
	5 setflat flattenpath pathbbox		% note "5 setflat"
	4 2 roll pop pop			% otherwise the same
    grestore
} bind def


% Glenn

-- 
 Glenn Reid				RightBrain Software
 glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us		PostScript/NeXT developers
 ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn		415-851-1785