[Devel] helvetica narrow metrics ... more info

[Ian Brown]

Re: my message on 23rd July.

> I have a strange problem with the helvetica narrow font (HVN_____.PFB).
> When I find the character widths for this font, the values I get back are
too
> large ... in fact they are identical to normal helvetica (HV______.PFB).
> This is quite a serious issue because it  means my wordwrap and
> right-justification calculations are all wrong (postscript calculates the
> widths correctly ... i.e. differently than freetype).

I've been doing some more investigation as this issue is getting quite
serious for me.
I wrote a small program to decompile the .PFB fonts.
It seems that the font programs in the 2 fonts are identical (i.e. The hsbw
values are identical for all glyphs). In fact, the only difference is in the
/FontMatrix.

Helvetica: /FontMatrix[0.001 0 0 0.001 0 0]
Helvetica Narrow: /FontMatrix[0.00082 0 0 0.001 0 0]

It seems that the freetype type 1 loader ignores the FontMatrix and just
looks at the hsbw values in the glyph data. The result is that is returns
incorrect widths for Helvetica Narrow.

Am I doing something wrong (see previous post for how I am calling the
library) or is this really a problem with freetype.

Ian