[reportlab-users] Font size, baseline and typography stuff

[Dinu Gherman]

Hi, long time no see!

I started a little project with strong requirements on
typography, which made me write the little attached
test script to see how much the reportlab library can
actually be helpful here. Doing so I noticed a couple
of things which make me state/raise the following re-
marks/questions:

1. The ascent/descent values seem to be numbers in the
range [0 ... 1000] representing a fraction of the font
size. That's fine, but I couldn't find a note in the
code saying so explicitly, which would just reduce a
bit of guess work.

2. I wonder if there is a way for any given font to
find the x-height defining the "mean line" (or
"midline") as described and illustrated here:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Font_metrics

In the PDF generated by my script I approximated this
as shown by the dashed lines using an x-height equal
to the x-width which is not really acceptable, though.

3. Looking at the PDF output of the attached script,
you'll see that for Times-Italic the rightmost letter
N is slightly outside the grey box with a horizontal
size calculated by the function stringWidth with the
correct font name.

I'm not a typography expert, but I wonder if this be-
haviour is correct? If so, I wonder how the width of
slanted fonts is actually defined, then? Unfortunately,
the all knowing Wikipedia doesn't give an immediate
answer, at least not here:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_type

If you run the script in a directory that does also
contain the Rina.ttf file from the reportlab distri-
bution it will also be shown in the PDF.

Regards,

Dinu
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