Right-justification

[George Jansen <GJANSEN@AFLCIO.ORG>]

A couple of days ago somebody had a question about right justification
of proportional fonts. My suggestion on this:

1. Load up your font widths into a table with rows approximately
   <FONT, CHR, RAW_UNITS, PROPORTIONAL_UNITS>

   where CHR is the ascii value: 65 = 'A', etc, RAW_UNITS are what you
cribbed from an AFM file or something like that,  and PROPORTIONAL_UNITS
are (say) the RAW_UNITS(this_char)/RAW_UNITS('M').

2. Write a stored procedure taking a string, a font, and a point size,
and returning an estimated width. In Oracle, I'd create a package, with
spec something like

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE sqr_font_scaling AS

   FUNCTION width_in_points
      (p_string IN VARCHAR2,
       p_font IN VARCHAR2,
       p_font_size IN NUMBER)
   RETURN NUMBER;

END sqr_font_scaling;
/

This will be callable from SQL, ergo from sqr, as

BEGIN-SELECT
 sqr_font_scaling.width_in_points($header,'Arial', 10)
FROM dual
END-SELECT

3. (Or maybe 0.) Explain to the incredibly fussy managers or whoever
has to have the stuff right-justified how much time this will take, and
what you could otherwise accomplish in it.

My suspicion is that a long afternoon might give you  encouraging
results, and that even a stored procedure such as this might give
adequate results, given that it's not being called all the time.