Generating PDF from a C program. How do I get dimensions of rendered text?

Hello.
I am generating a PDF file from withing a C program I am developing and I am running into trouble measuring the dimensions of arbitrary text string when rendered on the page. Even if I had widths of individual glyphs in the font I am using, I would still run into trouble considering ligatures. My questions are the following:
When I generate a PDF file, I have to provide the /Widths array dictionary entry for the font I use. How do I get these values? Is it possible to get them out of the font file (OTF/Type-1) easily?
If I do have the widths of individual glyphs and the ascent/descent values for the whole font, I still need ascent/descent for individual glyphs so that I can typeset things perfectly. How about these? Can they be read from the formats mentioned above?
What confuses me is this. A PDF writer (be it Microsoft Word) knows the font it is using to write text, obviously. When it saves the document as PDF, does it really inspect the font to dig out the glyph sizes?
I do not use any libraries whatsoever, I am generating the whole file and its PostScript streams "by hand".
Thanks!
David

1. Yes, you need to provide Widths and they MUST be right (a conflict with the font values is bad news). It depends what you mean by "easy". It's possible to parse each different font type, but hard work, at least for the format I understand (type 1). If the font is installed in the system you can use the OS to return font metric information for most things. StemV/StemH are a particular challenge as the values are not in type 1 fonts.
It is tough enough for type 1 fonts that the AFM format was invented to provide font information in simple text format, and there should be an AFM for every type 1 font. Be sure to retrieve metric information at a very large size to avoid rounding issues. If you are working with the base fonts only it's easy enough to generate a table for them.
Ligatures should be no issue at all. A ligature is a single glyph with its own metrics. You either use the individual characters (so ligatures are irrelevant) or you replace groups with a ligature (at which point it becomes a single glyph to manage). There is no automatic conversion of ligatures.
2. This would be in the font, but it would be most unusual to make use of individual glyph's ascent/descent in typesetting layout calculations, as I understand it. The important things are
(a) use font ascent/descent over the whole line for all fonts and sizes used to ensure there is enough room for characters
(b) set each glyph on the same baseline
What do you see yourself as doing with the glyph ascent/descent?
If an application generates PDF, then it really must do this stuff. Word knows all this anyway, because it needs to do the calculations to place text on screen.
Please do not try to generate PDFs entirely by hand. Many people try, but nobody manages to get stream length and xref entries right. You cannot rely on PDF readers to repair. Please write your own software to generate these things. PDF is not a text format, even though it has a lot of text in it.

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