Units of measure in boxable

[aycoholleman]

I am a bit confused about the unit of measure generally used as input or output for the API. More concretely:

I want to get thewidth of a string, given a font and font size, in millimeters. I also want to express the font size itself in millimeters.

If I look into the source code of your FontUtils class, I see this method:

  public static float getStringWidth(final PDFont font, final String text, final float fontSize) {
    try {
      return font.getStringWidth(text) / 1000 * fontSize;
    } catch (final IOException e) {
      // turn into runtime exception
      throw new IllegalStateException("Unable to determine text width", e);
    }
  }

I assume the unit of measure for fontSize is points, and what's returned is also the string width in points, but I am not sure.

So to create an equivalent millimeter-based method:

  public static double getStringWidthMillimeters(String text, PDFont font, double fontSizeMM)
      throws IOException {
    double fontSizePts = fontSizeMM * POINTS_PER_MM;
    double widthPts = (font.getStringWidth(text) / 1000) * fontSizePts;
    double widthMM = widthPts / POINTS_PER_MM;
    return widthMM;
  }

This feels very fishy, because the multiplication and subsequent division by POINTS_PER_MM really cancel out:

return ((font.getStringWidth(text) / 1000) * (fontSizeMM * POINTS_PER_MM)) / POINTS_PER_MM;

Could you help me out here?

Regards,

Ayco