Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!ico!rcd
From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: fonts with numeric characters of varying widths? (fixable)
Summary: there is a not-too-hard workaround
Message-ID: <1991Mar1.013716.28298@ico.isc.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 01:37:16 GMT
References: <6904@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO
Lines: 25

A little more about the problem posed by nvi@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Charles
C. Allen):

> I was very surprised to find that the Tekton font from Adobe has
> numeric characters of varying widths.  This renders it useless for
> many intended uses here...

Depending on what sort of software you're using with the fonts, you may be
able to work around this:  You can add a little PostScript to give you a
font which works like the base font except that the figures will be
constant width.  The re-encoding basic idea is in the Red book - they show
just a width adjustment, but you should do side-bearing adjustment also.
For example, pick a width (either digit 0 or widest digit) and set up a
/Metrics entry with [sidebearing,width] entries for each digit, using the
chosen width and a sidebearing calculated as
	original sidebearing - 1/2(new width - old width)
It's possible to write this as a general PostScript procedure which will
gather all the crud out of the font itself (looking for Encoding, doing
stringwidth and charpath/flattenpath/pathbbox for each digit character,
etc.) for any arbitrary font, but it's a lot easier to write something
which massages the appropriate part of the .afm for the font into a (much
shorter) piece of PostScript to adjust that one font.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...But is it art?