[Devel] Re: ink metrics

[Keith Packard]

> Could somebody show me an application of ink metrics?  I would be
> extremely grateful.

Ink metrics are only used for "terminal emulator" fonts where the glyphs 
are artificially increased in size so that each occupies a bitmap precisely
(ascent + descent) high and (width) wide, which is (obviously) only useful 
for fixed-width "ink-inside" fonts.

As to how an application can take advantage of them, I'm a bit at a loss 
-- there was talk of using the ink metrics to accurately circumscribe the 
shape of each glyph with a rectangle.

> Currently, the PCF driver ignores ink metrics.  I will make them
> accessible by defining a flag PCF_LOAD_INK_METRICS: invoking
> Load_Glyph with this flag set will result in getting glyph metrics
> from the /ink_metrics/ table rather than the /metrics/ table.  

I suggest you continue to ignore the PCF ink metrics; they're only 
important for terminal emulator fonts and then only vaguely interesting.

address@hidden   XFree86 Core Team              SuSE, Inc.