Re: [MacPerl] estimating printed width of some text

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 13.11 -0400 1998.08.03, Mark Manning wrote:
>Anyway, if you know that a 9pt font is no large than 7 dots across then
>you have a rough estimate of just how wide any given line will be.  But
>there is one more step to this.  Certain letters are wider than others.
>Specifically, "m" and "M" are about the widest characters with "w" and
>"W" being up there with them.  So if for each time you see an "m" or a
>"w" you add half again as much (ie: for 5 you add 3 and for 7 you add 4)
>on to the number of dots across a string will take you are assured of
>almost always getting the width the right size.

In old-school journalism, layout editors would use a similar process.  Back
in the Day, I could tell you how wide a headline would be on a page just by
looking at the letters in a word processor.  My professor had us memorize
relative widths of all the letters, capital and lowercase.  We also walked
uphill in the snow both ways ...

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

***** Want to unsubscribe from this list?
***** Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to mac-perl-request@iis.ee.ethz.ch