RE: [ft] putting text in a box

[David Bevan]

Werner,

Perhaps the following would be suitable / sufficient:

xMin gives the horizontal distance from the glyph's origin to the left edge of 
the glyph's bounding box. If xMin is negative, the glyph extends to the left of 
the origin.

David %^>


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Werner LEMBERG [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: 21 January 2010 09:24
> To: David Bevan
> Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [ft] putting text in a box
> 
> 
> > Is it also worth stating what a negative llx (xMin) value means, to
> > facilitate understanding.
> 
> This is more complicated to answer IMHO since the glyph's horizontal
> origin can be arbitrarily chosen by the font designer.  Normally, you
> shouldn't see large negative xMin values, if at all.  If you do, there
> is a high chance that all glyphs have similar negative xMin values:
> This might happen if the glyphs' origin is the horizontally centered,
> say.  Note that, BTW, `ascender' and `descender' values are not useful
> for many scripts like CJK.  It's mere convention that e.g. Adobe uses
> a descender of -200 font units (and 800 font units for the ascender)
> for CJK fonts.  To make such fonts fit with surrounding latin glyphs
> it is in most cases necessary to shift the glyphs vertically.
> 
> IMHO it's probably best to *not* go into details here.  However, if
> you find some proper wording I could add it easily.
> 
> 
>     Werner