design problem: fonts and spacing

[Mark Greenberg]

Charles,
	I'd be tempted to show the stressed syllables in bold or blue or some 
other visually different format within the line.  That way the text and 
the scansion line will never be out of sync.  This solution won't 
account for consecutive syllables of similar stress though.
	You might want to explore two other possible ways to solve the 
problem: Unicode probably has a diacritic mark for the traditional 
stressed and unstressed symbols, and there is a way to get the pixel 
coordinates of a particular character, though I don't recall the 
function's name.  Perhaps someone on the list can tell what the 
function is.  Then you could line up the text and scan lines.  (I used 
the latter for math equations in which one number must line up 
vertically with another.  As I recall, it worked well.)

		Mark Greenberg

On Thursday, June 30, 2005, at 05:17 AM, Charles Hartman wrote:

> I'm reviving an old Hypercard tutorial on English Metrics -- how to
> scan metrical verse in English. It contains lots of scansions, which
> have this general form:
>
>      x      /   |  /       /   |  x  (/) |  x    / |  x (/)
>      A sight so touching in its majesty
>
> As you can see, the spacing of the two lines _in relation to each
> other_ is critical.
>
> I'm finding that when I close and reopen my stack, the spacing of the
> upper (scansion) line is sometimes off -- too condensed or too spaced
> out. I set the Font for the whole stack file to Palatino. I'm also
> not sure if that's a good idea, because I haven't yet been able to
> ttest whether it will work on Windows. I'm developing on OS X.
>
> One solution is to put all the scansion-line-pairs into Courier --
> monospaced, universally available, and really ugly. Another is to do
> all the scansions as graphic images, but there are hundreds of them.
>
> Is there a better solution?