On 2018-03-23 16:44, David Carlisle wrote:
there are several ways to get the box output in classic tex (or xetex)
although perhaps the easiest (and safest in terms of not accidentally
affecting the typeset positions) is to use \showoutput so all boxes
are (somewhat verbosely) logged in the log file, and then parse that
with perl or python or whatever to get whatever lengths you need,
David
David, do you have a life? Everywhere I see some conversation about
TeX, your name is there...
Anyway, I just now tried your idea (thanks!), but I'm not clear how to
parse the results. When I run a small example with xelatex, I see lines
like
-------------
.\vbox(608.40024+0.0)x360.0, shifted 54.0
..\vbox(12.0+0.0)x360.0, glue set 12.0fil
(some lines omitted)
..\vbox(541.40024+0.0)x360.0, glue set 503.14648fil
(some lines omitted)
...\hbox(7.71974+2.25569)x360.0, glue set - 0.17555
....\hbox(0.0+0.0)x17.0
....\TU/lmr/m/n/10.95 Now
--------------
(where the word "Now" is the first word in one of the lines of PDF
output). I think the first hbox is a line of text in the output, but I
don't know what to make of those numbers. They seem to be approximately
the same for every line's hbox in the trivial example I wrote (except
for the number after "glue set", which is different for each one), so
maybe they translate into the horizontal position and/or size of the
line's hbox. And maybe the vbox line is the entire paragraph's box,
where the numbers translate into the vertical position and/or size of
the vbox. But I'm not sure how to go from those numbers to the position
(in points) of each hbox in the output PDF.
Is there a guide somewhere to interpreting this trace? I didn't see
anything on-line.
Mike
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