In this sample code, the author does the following
\draw ($(closedStart.south) + (-.5em,0)$)
edge[stateEdge] node[edgeLabel, xshift=-3em]{\emph{Passive open}}
($(listen.north) + (-.5em,0)$);
What irritates me most about these markup based drawing tools is that I've to measure a value and specify. In this case, the author specifies .5em
I've yet not understood how to figure that out? How much is .5em? I don't even know the size of the base object, so how can I be sure that if I give a value it will be valid?
Is there any approach to do this? How should I decide the value and also the unit? Is em always the best unit to use?
Google is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Em_%28typography%29
An em is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the point size of the current font. This unit is not defined in terms of any specific typeface, and thus is the same for all fonts at a given point size. So, 1 em in a 16 point typeface is 16 points.
You can change the unit of measurement to anything supported by latex, i'm sure: in, mm, cm, pts, picas, etc etc.
Not too sure how TikZ handles it but in LaTeX you can specify measurements as fractions (larger or smaller than 1) of known lengths, so you could set a length to be, say, 0.5\textwidth. My bet is that TikZ has this sort of facility so if you are going to be a long term user you'll want to figure it out.
To expand on what Mica says:
ems are the usual way that intercharacter space is measured, and is historically was the width of a character "M" in a given font ("M" normally being the widest letter in Latin-based fonts): crucially, it is a relative measure, and subscript fonts, say, have a smaller em than normal text. Modern fonts generally have narrower "M" characters than historically, and there are many non-Latin fonts, so the em measure is now derived from the dimensions of the square (or oblong) that the font designer places the character in, and is communicated as a parameter, together with such facts as the height of the baseline that text sits on, that tells us the scale of the font.
The point size of a font is the number of points (usually 1/72 inch) to an em, so a 12 point font is one whose character "M" is 1/6th of an inch wide (i.e., 12/72 in). The subscripts of a 12 point font are usually shown in a 7 point font, for which the em is just under 1/10th inch.
If you want to do positioning on a page, use points. If you want to control spacing in text, use ems because they scale.
Postscript
Fixed the discussion of the character `M', thanks to Mica.
Related
In OpenLayers I use ol.style.Text to add a text label to federal states polygons. The states have names of different length and also polygons of different sizes. It looks like this:
Is it possible to only print the text marker if it fits inside its polygon (e.g. after zooming in)? For instance, in the above example Hessen, Thüringen, Sachsen and Bayern would be printed, but Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland and Baden-Württemberg would be omitted because the text goes beyond its feature's geometry...
I know I can set the font property of an ol.style.Text to a particular size based on the resolution but this does not help here as text would still overlap the borders sometimes...
This is currently not possible with help from the library. But you can use CanvasRenderingContext2D#measureText() in your vector layer's stlyeFunction to get the width of the label, and compare that with the extent's width of the polygon at a certain resolution, and decide based on that whether to render or not. You can also get smarter than using the extent's width, but it is probably a good enough approximation for many cases.
I have a font where unfortunately the numbers and letters are different heights. I need to display a reference code which is a mix of letters and numbers and the uneven heights of the characters looks jarring. Is it possible with core text (or another technology on iOS) to render certain characters with a slightly stretched height so that it looks even numbers and letters are displayed together.
E.g i have the string '23Rt59RQ' I need the 2,3,5,9 to be rendered with a larger height.
AFAICT, there's nothing in the CGContext API (which is what you'd want to use for laying out sets of glyphs) which would directly, easily facilitate this.
If it's really very important to use the font you are using, you could make separate calls to CGContextShowGlyphsAtPositions for alphabetic and numeral characters, calling CGContextSetFontSize each time so that the end result ends up matching, but this is a lot of overhead for just drawing text, and will probably result in undesirable performance.
My real advice would be to pick a better font so that this isn't even an issue :)
In the end of used regex to identify the character groups and then created an attributed string varying the font size in the font given in the NSFontAttributeName attribute according to which characters were to be displayed.
Kinda hacky but it had the desired effect.
I am using buttons to display product names in a matrix using TGridLayout.
The problem is that commonly Items contains 3 or 4 words and in my language (Portuguese) some words tend to be long.
I would like that somehow I could calculate the size of the font, decreasing it, in order to make all the text show up automatically (of course there is also a decrease limit, anything below 9 or 8 point for the font turn to be difficult to read).
The wordwrap property is turned on to have many lines, and use the most possible space for the text.
I don't know if you're programming for an Android/iOS app, but you can't change the fontsize of a button. I've had the same problem, my solution was to make an abbreviation of the words. And then i put labels above it to explain the abbreviations.
Of course you can adjust the font size of a button:
TButton.TextSettings.Font.Size
I am looking for a function which should take parameters as Font name, sample character, width, height of the sample character and should return Font Size.
It must look like this:
GetFontSize(<Font Name>, <Sample Character>, <Sample Character Width>,
<Sample Character Height>)
which must return the font size,
Is this possible in delphi?
You may want to take a look at this page that discusses font size and points.
It uses the following to convert between the points and pixel size:
Arial 12pt at 96 dpi:
font size in points 12
font size in pixels = ------------------- × 96 dpi = ---- × 96 = 16 pixels
72 points per inch 72
You could use that for your conversion. You just need to be aware of possible differences in your screen dpi as Blorgbeard stated. Points are usually used to describe the size on paper. You need to decide how you want to map that to the screen. For example many programs will allow you to set a zoom level. That does not change the printed size on paper but does affect the pixel height on the screen.
Depending on what you are trying to accomplish you may need to get the actual sizes of the font. If you are trying to find out exactly how the font is put together take a look at Obtaining Font Metrics The code on that page uses the .Net libraries but it has a good explanation. If you want to get the Text Metrics in Delphi you would use the GetTextMetrics function.
As Rob stated in his comment you can draw text at a specific height by setting the Font.Size property to the negative height in pixels. Windows will then draw the text out at that height. In that case you don't need a specific letter or the width as you have in your prototype function. For a given font size each letter will have a different height and width. I.E. capital letters will be taller than lower case letters and letters like "W" will be wider than letters like "i".
I'm only aware of methods to do the opposite - that is, to get pixel sizes from point sizes.
The only way I can think of is to set up a TCanvas, and repeatedly call GetTextExtent on it, changing the font size each time, until you get a size that's acceptably close to what you want.
Depending on how accurate you need this, you could just convert your desired height in pixels to points - a point is 1/72 of an inch, and your screen is probably 96 pixels per inch (but check GetDeviceCaps to get the real figure). See this question.
That would get you a font size pretty close to the pixel size you want.
I have a LOGFONT structure. Now all i'd like to do is get the associated font size in points from the LOGFONT height.
When the mapping mode is mm_Text (which it usually is), and when the lfHeight field is positive, it already gives the height in points. When it's negative, the units are pixels. MSDN for LogFont gives you the formula to convert between them:
lfHeight = -MulDiv(PointSize, GetDeviceCaps(hDC, LOGPIXELSY), 72);
There are 72 points per inch. GetDeviceCaps tells you the number of pixels per inch on a given device. Invert the formula to get pixels from points:
PointSize := MulDiv(-lfHeight, 72, GetDeviceCaps(hDC, LogPixelsY);
The important thing to realize here is that you need a device context. Font sizes don't exist independently of the media they appear on. The pixel height of a font on the screen will be different from the pixel height of a font on a printer. Use the Handle property of whatever canvas you're planning on drawing to.
I find this a bit confusing, as well.
Here are a few things that I háve learned. ;)
Examine the two low-order bits of lfPitchAndFamily to determine the font type.
For fixed-pitch fonts, use GetTextMetrics and the TEXTMETRIC structure.
For variable-pitch fonts (true-type, etc), use GetOutlineTextMetrics and the OUTLINETEXTMETRIC structure. Be sure you have the structure aligned properly. Also, the structure is variable-sized. Call the function once to get the size, allocate space, then call the function again to fill the structure.
From there, you can find proper ascent, descent, and other size-related information.
Keep in mind that they are recommended values and not all display routines will use them properly. For example, I am in the process of figuring out a correct method of determining the required height of a dialog box static control for a given string of text.
It does not appear that Microsoft has followed their own documentation. ;)
Not that the documentation is all that clear or complete, to begin with.