AFM(3pm) User Contributed Perl Documentation AFM(3pm)
NAME
Font::AFM - Interface to Adobe Font Metrics files
SYNOPSIS
use Font::AFM;
$h = new Font::AFM "Helvetica";
$copyright = $h->Notice;
$w = $h->Wx->{"aring"};
$w = $h->stringwidth("Gisle", 10);
$h->dump; # for debugging
DESCRIPTION
This module implements the Font::AFM class. Objects of this class are
initialised from an AFM (Adobe Font Metrics) file and allow you to
obtain information about the font and the metrics of the various glyphs
in the font.
All measurements in AFM files are given in terms of units equal to
1/1000 of the scale factor of the font being used. To compute actual
sizes in a document, these amounts should be multiplied by (scale factor
of font)/1000.
The following methods are available:
$afm = Font::AFM->new($fontname)
Object constructor. Takes the name of the font as argument. Croaks
if the font can not be found.
$afm->latin1_wx_table()
Returns a 256-element array, where each element contains the width of
the corresponding character in the iso-8859-1 character set.
$afm->stringwidth($string, [$fontsize])
Returns the width of the argument string. The string is assumed to be
encoded in the iso-8859-1 character set. A second argument can be
used to scale the width according to the font size.
$afm->FontName
The name of the font as presented to the PostScript language
"findfont" operator, for instance "Times-Roman".
$afm->FullName
Unique, human-readable name for an individual font, for instance
"Times Roman".
$afm->FamilyName
Human-readable name for a group of fonts that are stylistic variants
of a single design. All fonts that are members of such a group should
have exactly the same "FamilyName". Example of a family name is
"Times".
$afm->Weight
Human-readable name for the weight, or "boldness", attribute of a
font. Examples are "Roman", "Bold", "Light".
$afm->ItalicAngle
Angle in degrees counterclockwise from the vertical of the dominant
vertical strokes of the font.
$afm->IsFixedPitch
If "true", the font is a fixed-pitch (monospaced) font.
$afm->FontBBox
A string of four numbers giving the lower-left x, lower-left y,
upper-right x, and upper-right y of the font bounding box. The font
bounding box is the smallest rectangle enclosing the shape that would
result if all the characters of the font were placed with their
origins coincident, and then painted.
$afm->UnderlinePosition
Recommended distance from the baseline for positioning underline
strokes. This number is the y coordinate of the center of the stroke.
$afm->UnderlineThickness
Recommended stroke width for underlining.
$afm->Version
Version number of the font.
$afm->Notice
Trademark or copyright notice, if applicable.
$afm->Comment
Comments found in the AFM file.
$afm->EncodingScheme
The name of the standard encoding scheme for the font. Most Adobe
fonts use the "AdobeStandardEncoding". Special fonts might state
"FontSpecific".
$afm->CapHeight
Usually the y-value of the top of the capital H.
$afm->XHeight
Typically the y-value of the top of the lowercase x.
$afm->Ascender
Typically the y-value of the top of the lowercase d.
$afm->Descender
Typically the y-value of the bottom of the lowercase p.
$afm->Wx
Returns a hash table that maps from glyph names to the width of that
glyph.
$afm->BBox
Returns a hash table that maps from glyph names to bounding box
information. The bounding box consist of four numbers: llx, lly,
urx, ury.
$afm->dump
Dumps the content of the Font::AFM object to STDOUT. Might sometimes
be useful for debugging.
The AFM specification can be found at:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5004.AFM_Spec.pdf
ENVIRONMENT
METRICS Contains the path to search for AFM-files. Format is as for
the PATH environment variable. The default path built into
this library is:
/usr/lib/afm:/usr/local/lib/afm:/usr/openwin/lib/fonts/afm/:.
BUGS
Kerning data and composite character data are not yet parsed. Ligature
data is not parsed.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995-1998 Gisle Aas. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
perl v5.34.0 2022-10-13 AFM(3pm)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 07:23:27 CET 2025.