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<p class="MsoNormal">Hello! Sorry to intrude on your dev mailing list, this may seem a little off topic, but I have been banging my head on this forever, and I know you guys are the experts at typography! <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I was wondering if the developers that have worked on this before would like to talk some about this, I'd really appreciate it!<br>
<br>
It may seem a little off-topic at first glance, but I think you guys will be a great resource if anyone is willing!
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Basically, I have some questions on how to calculate the line spacing between lines, when parsing and rendering a docx file.<br>
<br>
My requirement is to exactly match <b>Word</b>, not necessarily the OOXML spec, in the spacing between lines in a simple paragraph when parsing and rendering a docx.<br>
<br>
In order to try to do this, I have built a tool to analyze the differences between my layout and Word's layout. To do so it does the following:<br>
<br>
- First it generates a (or many) docx files.<br>
- Next it creates pdfs from the docx files. It uses Word to render the docx to PDF, and my program to render the docx to PDF. "word.pdf", and "me.pdf"<br>
- Then it analyzes the resulting PDFs for differences in layout.<br>
<br>
So, my tool would say:<br>
<br>
- Create a document "template.docx" with 1000 "a" characters in a single run of text with the same properties.<br>
- Make a "word.pdf" and "me.pdf" from this docx<br>
- Calculate info from the pdfs, in particular, calculating the line spacing in terms of the calculated leading between a lines ascent and the previous lines descent (our (Ascent + Descent) are identical-ish, so all that differs is the whitespace between lines).
I often think of it as the lines whitespace...<br>
<br>
This tool showed me that the leading varies greatly from font to font.<br>
<br>
To depict this, I used the tool to make thousands of these comparisons, in particular generating for:<br>
<br>
- For each font in system<br>
- For "a", "y", and a mix of letters and spaces.<br>
- For different font sizes.<br>
- For different line spacing types (Single, One and a half, and Double)<br>
<br>
I was hoping to find groupings, such as "this type of font has 1.3 times my calculation of leading". <br>
<br>
I was able to conclude far less than I had hoped, and was wondering if you could help me further with the issue of calculating line spacing. I'm providing you with a file that is best downloaded and opened using the filters in the header row. Note that its
not totally complete, there are missing entries, but I doubt they will be a problem for anyone, and I'm going to regenerate it soon but its pretty slow, so I'm finishing up some changes to it first.<br>
<br>
Here is a comparison of the layout of our software, vs the layout of Word's for every font installed on my system, etc. (attached and linked)<br>
<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzQpUdPjnJUUclRXVXFkaEh3Mms/view?usp=sharing">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzQpUdPjnJUUclRXVXFkaEh3Mms/view?usp=sharing</a><br>
<br>
I'm not positive, but I believe the issue could be one of the following:<br>
<br>
- Word is using a different process than we are to calculate the "leading" of a font. We don't parse the font files ourselves, instead rely on libraries to get font sizing information, and perhaps in the "world of font files" I am missing something, and word
is parsing the fonts directly and differently.<br>
- Word has some sort of lookup table that handles groups of fonts, or an algorithm, that scales a fonts leadings up or down based on some criteria I am unaware of.<br>
- Word is using an additional criteria besides leading, ascent, and descent, to determine line spacing.<br>
<br>
Please feel free to email me at <b><a href="mailto:nathanb@windward.net">nathanb@windward.net</a></b><br>
<br>
Thank you so much for your time!!<o:p></o:p></p>
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