[texhax] Character bounding boxes

[Ranjith Unnikrishnan]

Hartmut,

That sounds like a more promising general direction and I'd certainly
be up for pursuing it. Could you advise me on what the right entry
points for making these modifications would be? I haven't hacked latex
or the pdftex engine before, so any details (docs, webpages on related
topics etc.) would be immensely useful.
Thanks!
~R

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, Ranjith Unnikrishnan wrote:
>
>> Following the above procedure would give me the dimensions that each
>> character requires *in isolation*. Working with my previous example,
>> if my text is $y = x ^2$, I want the coordinates (not the dimensions!)
>> of the bounding boxes of the individual characters ("y", "=", etc.) as
>> they would occur when rendered within the whole $y=x^2$ string.
>
> if you have a little fun of hacking, the actually easiest and most
> straightforward way seems to be adding print statements for page
> coordinates (cur_h, cur_v) to the pdftex engine just at the few places
> where glyphs and other stuff (rules etc.) are put on the page.
>
> Regards, Hartmut
>