[ft] bbox?

[Dmitri Hrapof]

Hello!

I'm rather new to fonts. I've spent today looking through the docs, but 
can't find the answer.
Is there any way to get, for given font size (in points), resolution and 
transformation, a "bounding box" for a face i.e. rectangle, measured in 
points, that will be large enough to contain any of the font's glyphs, 
and offsets necessary to place a glyph correctly within such a rectangle?
The only thing I can think of now is to iterate through the glyphs and 
look at their bitmap rows and bitmap-tops... :(
For example, I don't understand why A with ^ has bitmap-top 16 and row 
count 16, while the vertical bar (used in table drawing) has bitmap-top 
13 and row count 17.
The bar is meant to go from top to bottom; why does it have bitmap-top 
smaller than A^?

Sincerely yours,
Dmitri