Re: [Caml-list] Basic typesetting

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

Zitat von michael.le_barbier@laposte.net:
[...]
> So if you use a typesetting engine as a backend to typeset text, you
> have three ways to know the size of an object:
>   1. ask the engine;
>   2. examine the engine's output;
>   3. reimplement the engine's algorithms.
> You do not seriously consider 3. as an option, do you?
[...]

One can ask Ghostscript (gs) for the bounding box.

I think it was something like

$ gs -sDEVICE=bbox mypsfile.ps

and this should also work with pdf-files.

But then you get the bounding-box of the whole file.
So you have to use this way for each construct of
your page, what IMHO makes no sense.

But if you need this only occasionally, it might make sense.

I don't know the "fop" that was mentioned, but I
gs is about 5 MB big executable, and it's an interpreter.
But it's not written in Java, maybe it's faster and lighter
than the "fop" ;-)

Ciao,
   Oliver

P.S.: Or make a server as a wrapper around gs, so you do
      not have to restart it again and again ;-)
      But as far as I know, some TeX-Implementations are
      in work, that are running as a formatting-daemon.
      So, this might be also a way to make efficient typesetting.
      But if it's only for one single page, using gs by hand,
      invoked from the shell might be ok ;-)