Pixel positions of text elements

[edward.j...@gmail.com]

Greetings.

I'd like to be able to render text and recover the pixel bounding
boxes of each character. To put it another way, I'd like to be able
to put text on the screen and then draw a bounding rectangle around
each character as I touch it with the mouse. This is obviously
possible--every mouse-based text editor knows where its characters
are--but I can't find a library that exposes this sort of
functionality.

I'm just starting and am very open about environments and languages,
so any advice at all will probably be helpful.

Many thanks.

Ed