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How can you control letter spacing using ATSUCreateTextLayoutWithTextPtr ?
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How can you control letter spacing using ATSUCreateTextLayoutWithTextPtr ?

I am trying to draw a sequence of unicode letters with controllable spacing. My first cut was to use ATSUCreateTextLayoutWithTextPtr() to draw each character one at a time. Needless to say this is very slow, and has the really nasty side effect of using special ending characters in fonts like Apple Chancery, which has alternative letters for the last character in a word, and I am getting all the letters with special ending forms which is of course totally incorrect.

I can imagine adding mixed point size letters in the stream to achieve additional spacing between two letters for example the letter A 12 pt, followed by a space in 2 pt size, followed by a B in 12 pt, followed by a 2pt space, followed by C would draw ABC widely spaced. The problem is that this approach doesn't allow for negative spacing between letters (to make the letters tighter together than normal).

How does one efficiently offer tighter than normal or wider than normal spacing, without resorting to the addition of a special font that contains negative width characters, which would require special presence tests, and a more complicated install?

I don't know why the designers of text output routines always seem to fail to account for letter spacing issues; letter spacing is a very important issue in copyfitting, and we need control over this.


edj

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