#Character Spacing Info
2 messages in this thread
Scott,
We provide the AFM files which do contain the font metric information. We do
not have any "generic" character spacing charts because each font is quite
different. It is possible to look at the file format for the AFM files and
extract the information that you need. There is a file called F-AFM.DOC that
contains the specifics of the AFM file format.
-Esther Kletter
I think Scott was looking for a "characters per pica" average figure for each
font/size. This is a common value in commercial typesetting, since it allows
a reasonable estimate of column depth–or page count–to be made from a
manuscript. It's based on an "average" mix of text, and I guess one could
write a program to compute a value from an AFM file. A typesetter I have done
work with produced a type book with samples of type in many sizes, and he had
his Quadex front-end system compute a characters-per-pica value from the
sample blocks. It would be handy to have Adobe compute such values and
include them in the font catalog. Book and magazine publishers find these
numbers very useful.