rday (04/25/83)
Since this is a very obscure question, I won't go into a detailed introduction; anyone who may know the answer will know what I am talking about. The glyphs used in ditroff (and in the old vfont library) have values for up, down, left and right distances of the edges of the glyph from the origin. Negative values for left or down meant that the edge was actually to the right or up, respectively, from the origin. It seems that, if all values are positive, the width of the character is equal to left + right, while the height is equal to up + down (fairly reasonable). The problem occurs when one of these values is negative; the resulting height (or width) is equal to up + down + 1 (or left + right + 1). Is there some rationale for this? Has anyone else noticed this? Any info will be greatly appreciated. Thanx in advance. Rob Day M.F.C.F. U. of Waterloo