Re: [MacPerl] estimating printed width of some text

["Jefferson R. Lowrey" <lowrey@postoffice.sells.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 ...

Well, several years ago, I had to write a set of routines that would
produce a data set on the page.  I knew that the WIDTH would be fine, but I
didn't know how many data points I had until I had them.  In order to make
sure that I could fit the entire data set on one page, in two columns, I
multiplied the char height by the number of rows I had.  If it was too big,
I divided the output font size in half.  Repeat.  Effective, in a way.
Certainly, I wasn't going to be the one who had to read the hardcopy (and
the potential size of the datasets was limited such that it wouldn't ever
get TOO small ;-)

-jeff lowrey



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