oversized bandwidth label boxes

[cerbum]

Attached a screen snippet.

It seems that both in classic and angled for BWSTYLE there is a "header" above all of the numbers given as bandwidth usage. This space is a bit of a waste, and ends up making compact maps harder.

I've looked at "BWOUTLINECOLOR none" and "BWBOXCOLOR none" from the "my map is ugly" topic here, and while that gets rid of the header space I actually want a box still wrapped around the label.

Is there a way that I am unaware of to lop off the header of the box and just have the top of the box be the same distance away from the characters as the bottom of the box?

Thanks,

-cerbum

[Howie]

It's usually to do with the bounding-box information in the truetype font - some fonts have bad information, which means Weathermap leaves too much/too little space - the angled boxes there are actually too short *and* too tall.

I would try a different font.

I'll look into adding some 'fudge factor' SET variables to fine tune this stuff, perhaps.

[cerbum]

It's usually to do with the bounding-box information in the truetype font - some fonts have bad information, which means Weathermap leaves too much/too little space - the angled boxes there are actually too short *and* too tall.

Okay, so It's not just me.

I would try a different font.

Got it. I'm working my way through a few different fonts to see if I can improve on what I've got. I already found one that makes it worse!

I'll look into adding some 'fudge factor' SET variables to fine tune this stuff, perhaps.

Don't spend a lot of time on this -- it's not a feature request.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing a configuration option that solved the problem.

Thanks,

-dave

[Howie]

I've been investigating this, and found these two bug reports.

One for GD, where someone else has gone through a lot of diagnosis:
http://bugs.libgd.org/?do=details&task_id=76

followed by one for FreeType, with no response:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?19813

Both those bugs are from 2007, which doesn't bode well.

At first I thought I had rounding errors in my box rotation code, because I could replicate a similar problem with only a 1 degree rotation, but having tried rotating backwards and forwards hundreds of times, it's not that, because it doesn't get worse.

So GD tells weathermap that text will by n pixels long, but when it's angled, it's actually >n. It seems the only solutions for me would be to stop using GD (pain) or add in some slop so it's not so obvious with text actually hitting the box (ugly).

So I'm going with ugly for now, so I can get on with multi-line labels. I've had a back-burner project to switch to a different graphics library, and possibly a different language, but not soon.