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