On 11-02-04 14:27, Jonathan Kew wrote: > Unfortunately, I don't think there's currently any way to do that. (Well, no > way within xetex, that is -- you could of course ship the box to the output > file, then post-process that with a tool of some kind to determine the glyph > ID, and then re-run the job using that information as input. But that's a > terribly cumbersome way to get to where you're trying to go!) > > It might be nice to have a command that could "look inside" boxes like that > and tell you the glyph IDs.... but then you'll probably find yourself wanting > their positions, too.... and then what if the contents of the box are more > complex than just a series of glyphs? Figuring out a usable TeX-level > interface to this could become awfully complex....... Ah, I was afraid you're going to say that :)
I do like the way \XeTeXglyphmetrics works, because, as you could see in my sample file I sent you offline, by typesetting two boxes, one with the command =0 and another =1, I can get the \ht and \dp dimensions and compare them, thus getting a reliable difference in "font height" and "glyph-derived height", and -- which is very important -- I get the two values separately (height and depth). And that does work on "any" box, i.e. if I put some non-textual objects there, the results will be the same, so what. As you might imagine, my second goal would be to get the left "sidebearing" and the right "sidebearing" (i.e. the differences between the inked bounding box and the declared typesetting origin). \XeTeXglyphbounds gives me that for a single glyph, but since there is no way to determine which glyphs will be used after a typesetting process, \XeTeXglyphbounds is only of theoretical value. I think the usefulness of having just the two edge values (the "left" and the "right" bounds) for a box would be sufficient for a large amount of purposes. This could be used to do custom margin alignment and perform any sort of corrections to the horizontal positioning of the box. Just like in case of \XeTeXglyphmetrics, I don't really desperately need to know WHICH glyph is "bumping up" the overall vertical height of a box, when I use it vs. not use it. The mere ability to measure the difference _per box_ is already very helpful. So, ideally something like \XeTeXboxbounds would be great: work the same way as \XeTeXglyphbounds but for a box (taking 1, 2, 3, 4 as parameter, and a box). As I said, that would already be extremely useful in a variety of cases, even though I wouldn't have access to individual glyph IDs and position inside the box. Just the outer differences between the box size and the rendered glyph stream size. It's much less common a case that I need to know all the details of my glyph stream (and, as you said, it's hard to report reliably the inner structure of a box if its contents is complex). But a simple interface to report the difference between the "inked" bounding box and the metrics reported using standard means would be a huge helper. I don't know how feasible this is, though. Many thanks for your help so far! Best, Adam -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
