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From: davis@3d.enet.dec.com (Peter Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: letter height
Message-ID: <1991May28.134420.3951@engage.pko.dec.com>
Date: 28 May 91 13:40:27 GMT
Sender: newsdaemon@engage.pko.dec.com (USENET News Daemon)
Distribution: comp.lang.postscript
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 27


In article <KL88A.91May27124328@cameron.ecs.soton.ac.uk>, kl88a@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Kris Lockyear) writes...
>
>I want a short piece of code to find out the dimensions of a single
>character. More specifically, the height from the baseline to the top
>of the letter.  This is because I want to occaisionally invert a
>letter in a word eg HELEN with the N upside down.  I have written the
>code so that I can invert the letter, but not so I know how much
>upwards I have to move it  ( the textheight used in scalefont is the
>maximum height from the tail of a letter like y to the top of a
>capital.)
>

This is very simple:

	(N) true charpath flattenpath pathbbox
	/y2 exch def /x2 exch def /y1 exch def /x1 exch def
	/height y2 y1 sub def
	newpath

If all you care about is the height, you could do:

	(N) true charpath flattenpath pathbbox
	exch pop exch sub /height exch def pop
	newpath

Note that you must have a current point somewhere for this to work.