Re: General Text Metrics Requirement

Allen,

I too have been struggling with the inability to calculate string length. I'm transforming Schema with XSLT to generate SVG and I want to draw a simple text box. I can draw a bounding box using filters, but that still doesn't give me the extents of the text box, it just renders it. I need to know where the end of the text box is so I draw a connector from it to the next box. 

My strategy is to estimate the length of the string based on the font size, draw the bounding rectangle and then set the textLength attribute to expand or shrink the text to fit. Sounds good, but I discovered that textLength is not supported by Adobe 3.0 Build 76, my defacto plugin. Oh well.

Another option is to use a fixed width font. Can someone identify a fixed with font-family value? Or where I can find a list of them?

I've attached the boundingBox.svg I found somewhere (apologies to the original author, I forgot where I got this). I think it might work for your application, if all you want to do is show the bounding box.

I wonder if the approach filters uses to return a "result" would be a valid architectural approach to determining the text length?

Hope this helps,
 <<boundingBox.svg>> 
________________________________________________________________
Kurt Kanaskie
Lucent Technologies
kkanaskie@lucent.com
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