measuring heights of words

[Malachi James]

I'm giving some feedback to a font developer, am trying to identify words in a Nastaliq font which are particularly tall. Is there a way to dump a wordlist into some sort of SILE document and get heights of the words back?

--Malachi

[Caleb Maclennan]

Sure you can. You can just stuff a word in an hbox and read back what size it ended up:

\begin{document}
\neverindent
\nofolios
\font[filename=/usr/share/fonts/OTF/LibertinusSerif-Regular.otf]
\begin{script}
local words = {
  "--",
   "oo",
   "ff",
   "jj",
   "fj"
}
for _, word in ipairs(words) do
   local box = SILE.call("hbox", {}, { word })
   SU.debug("words", box)
end
\end{script}

\end{document}

Run with:

    $ sile -b debug -d words mwe.sil

You can of course query the resulting box object for the specific properties you want at that point from Lua.

However I don't think this is the best tool for the job. You should probably work directly with a shaper, not a typesetter. For example you can get this information much more directly from Harfbuzz itself like this:

    $ hb-shape --show-extents /usr/share/fonts/OTF/LibertinusSerif-Regular.otf "fj"

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 8:51 PM Malachi James <malach...@team.org> wrote:

I'm giving some feedback to a font developer, am trying to identify words in a Nastaliq font which are particularly tall. Is there a way to dump a wordlist into some sort of SILE document and get heights of the words back?

--Malachi

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[Malachi James]

Thank you very much. I never got the SILE document to work properly. It seemed like the debugging output had height information but as far as I could tell the information didn't correctly correspond to tall or short words. I suspect that the RTL Nastaliq words using a Graphite-only font weren't joining correctly inside the hbox.

But the hb-shape clue got me on the right track. It took a bit of work because the output gives information about each glyph, not the word as a whole, and I was working with a wordlist of about 17,000 words, but in the end it worked out.