Xref: utzoo comp.text:7667 comp.text.tex:4127
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.tex
Path: utzoo!sq!lee
From: lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin)
Subject: Re: "optimally" scaling text to fit given bounding box
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.180018.17648@sq.sq.com>
Keywords: scaling fonts labels bounding box
Organization: SoftQuad Inc.
References: <578@siswat.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 90 18:00:18 GMT
Lines: 24

buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) writes:
>I would like to make lots of labels for many sizes of 3-ring binders, hanging
>files, etc.  [...] a thin (maybe dotted) rule
>as a bounding box with text inside.  I would like to be able to enter
>the snippet of text and have the program automatically scale the font
>and/or break the lines to fill the available space.

Well, tbl (a troff preprocessor) will do something similar -- it'll move text
around to fit a box, and make sure that the box is the right size, but it
won't alter the text size.

Actually it can look quite imprtessive to have a whole shelf of binders
with identically-formatted titles.  At my last job I had a shelf with titles
like "4.1 BSD Vol 2A", "Electronic Mail", "Manual Pages", "Networking" and
"Child Pornography".


Another approach is to write a PostScript procedure to fit text, perhaps using
the blue-book line-breaking algorithm, but I'd much rather do this in troff!

Lee

-- 
Liam R. E. Quin,  lee@sq.com, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, +1 (416) 963-8337