Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!sprite!montnaro
From: montnaro@sprite (Skip Montanaro)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: How to properly scale fonts in an application?
Message-ID: <9971@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 16 Mar 88 22:01:20 GMT
Sender: news@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP
Reply-To: montnaro@sprite.steinmetz.ge.com (Skip Montanaro)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 29

I'm writing a small NeWS application that needs to put some text up and I'm
having trouble setting the font size, other than by trial and error. I first
tried (for instance)

	/Times-Italic findfont 12 scalefont

in an attempt to get a 12-point font, and wound up with enormous text that
sprayed itself all over the screen.

My next attempt was to calculate the X dimension of the window after the
user had reshaped the window (call it WinX) and the X dimension of the
framebuffer (call it ScreenX) and do

	/Times-Italic findfont 12 WinX mul ScreenX div scalefont

thinking that the ratio of the window to screen dimension would help scale
things properly, but that didn't work either. So I started twiddling the
"12" and came up with

	/Times-Italic findfont 0.05 WinX mul ScreenX div scalefont

which isn't intuitive at all.

Can someone give me some advice about what I'm doing wrong?


Thanks,

Skip Montanaro (montanaro@sprite.steinmetz.ge.com, montanaro@ge-crd.arpa)