At 09.42 +0200 2000-09-20, Ulrich Dirr wrote:
[snip]
>May be it would be helpful if -- and what is in the AFM files -- to
>incorporate the ascender/cap height into the TFM (and let TeX know about
>that), so that one could align special material with respect to the
>ascender/cap heigth.

T1 encoded fonts in general already include these two parameters and a
couple of others. I would guess that the ones that interest you are:
  \fontdimen  8  is cap height
  \fontdimen  9  is ascender height
  \fontdimen 10  is accented cap height
  \fontdimen 11  is descender's depth
  \fontdimen 12  is max height
  \fontdimen 13  is max depth
I don't think there is a proper LaTeX interface for using them yet though
(although I think something like a fontdimen interface was part of some
early template example).

OTOH I have the impression that the usual way of getting predictable height
and depth of a box is to include a \strut in them (this is not all that
nice since the dimensions of the \strutbox only depends on the
\baselineskip, but people usually make do anyway).

Lars Hellström