Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!atari!imagen!geof
From: geof@imagen.UUCP (Geoffrey Cooper)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Anything but Courier!!
Message-ID: <1662@imagen.UUCP>
Date: 12 Mar 88 01:59:35 GMT
References: <20453@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Organization: IMAGEN Corporation, Santa Clara, CA 95052-8101
Lines: 48

To make a font monospaced, just add a Metrics directory into any font
with all the characters having the same width.  Take the width of a
particular character (an M will guarantee that characters don't
overlap) and use CharStrings to ensure that all characters are
given the new metric.  The code included below does this.

The output is pretty dreadful, because no attempt is made to center the
characters within the em space.  To do that, you'd have to go to the
next level of metrics dictionary, where each entry is a pair,
containing left side bearing and metrics info.  To center each
character, you need to know its bounding box.  You can either work on a
host from an AFM file, or compute the bounding boxes by taking the
charpath of the character and flattening it.  The latter approach is
computationally expensive, but the resultant font will still print well.
Don't expect the results to be too good, since the fonts are not
designed to look good when spaced that way.

------monospace.ps-------
%!
/make_monospace
{
    findfont dup setfont (M) stringwidth pop 1000 mul /_w exch def
    dup length 1 add dict begin
    {
        1 index /FID eq { pop pop } { def } ifelse
    }
    forall
    currentdict end
    dup
    dup /CharStrings get dup length dict begin
    {
        pop _w def
    }
    forall
    /Metrics currentdict put end
    definefont
}
def

/Times-Mono /Times-Roman make_monospace 10 scalefont setfont

72 72 moveto
(This is some text in Times monospace.) show

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{decwrl,sun,saber}!imagen!geof