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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: "optimally" scaling text to fit given bounding box
Keywords: scaling fonts labels bounding box
Message-ID: <1990Dec04.194302.5761@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 4 Dec 90 19:43:02 GMT
References: <578@siswat.UUCP>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 25

In article <578@siswat.UUCP> 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.  These labels would consist of 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.  Since I have
>maybe 100 labels, I would rather enter a simple text file that consisted
>of the strings and out pops the formated labels, ready to be printed
>on some heavier card stock and cut out for use.  I know I could
>do this all by hand with various drawing programs, but I am looking
>for something with a bit of intelligence.

>Does anyone know of any program that does this type of font scaling
>and line breaking automatically?

I just posted a program  (nametag.pl) to comp.lang.perl and alt.sources
that will generate nametags in postscript from a simple list.  It doesn't
break lines but it will rescale the font to fit if the first choice is
too large.  It consists of a perl program that calculates the
positioning for each line, but the scaling is done in postscript.
Changing a few constants in the program might make it do what you need.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us


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