JC> In doing so, I discovered that fixed, aka: JC> -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
JC> has an ASCENT of 11 and DESCENT of 2 (totalling 13), whereas JC> -b&h-Luxi Mono-medium-r-normal--[9.75 0 0 13]-0-75-75-m-0-iso8859-1 JC> while intended to match those metrics ends up with an ASCENT of 13 and JC> DESCENT of 3. Please, not that question. In short, the font's point size, ascent and descent are three random values that depend on the font, the font technology, and even the individual foundry or font designer. No particular relationship between the three values should be expected. As you probably know, a molten lead fo(u)nt is a collection of blocks of lead with glyphs embossed at the top. In order for the type to align neatly in the galley, all the blocks in a single font have the same dimension in the direction parellel to the paper but orthogonal to the direction of writing; this dimension is known as the font's /point size/, or /em size/, or /quad size/. Obviously, it is physically impossible to typeset two lines of 10 pt Garamond less than 10 pt away; on the other hand, nothing prevents you from typesetting them 12 pt away by inserting 2 pt wide strips of lead; you then speak of typesetting 10 pt Garamond with 2 pt /leading/, or sometimes 10/12 pt Garamond. Thus, with molten-lead fonts, for a given typeface, the choice of the point size is merely a technical decision, and very similar fonts can have different point sizes depending on the technical tradeoffs made by the foundry. While there have been attempts to rationalise this nowadays obsolete notion (most notably by Knuth), it has carried over to digital fonts. Nothing should be expected from the point size except that within a single family produced by a single foundry the size of glyphs should be roughly correlated with the point size. What about the font's ascent and descent? As opposed to a glyph's ascent and descent, which are well-defined notions, these have no meaning at all. They are arbitrary values that are produced mostly at random by the various font backends. In the case of the TrueType fonts in the FT1 or FT2 backends, they are merely scaled versions of values that are found in the font file -- randomly chosen by the font designer. For Type 1 fonts produced by FT2, they are scaled versions of the font's bounding box (and thus depend on the font's glyph coverage, but not the encoding). In the case of the Type 1 backend, they are the max of the scaled values of the bounding boxes of the glyphs present in the encoding (and thus depend on the encoding). In the case of bitmap fonts, they are just taken from the font file. The only reasonable use of the font's point size is to allow the (human) user to specify it. The only reasonable interpretation of the font's ascent and descent is to use them as a user-tweakable default for the positionment of baselines. Juliusz _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts