Getting the unscaled length of

Question

I'm developing a graphing application with FLEX 3 that will
be embedded into a PDF document (version 9). The graphing SWF is
pretty much finished, but I want to have greater control over the
scaling on the axis. If I graph the parametric equations x=cos(t)
and y=sin(t), the trace of these equations appears as an ellipse.
Is there some what if getting the unscaled length of the vertical
axis and the horizontal axis in pixels, so I can compute the exact
aspect ratio of the axes. If that is known, I can rescale using
scaleX and scaleY. Can anyone give me pointers?
dps

Answer 1

You can simply iterate through each line in text to get the widest line. Something like this:
Main();
function Main() {
    var text = app.selection[0],
    minLength, maxLength, start, end;
    for (var i = 0; i < text.lines.length; i++) {
        start = text.lines[i].characters[0].horizontalOffset,
        end = text.lines[i].characters[text.lines[i].characters.length-1].horizontalOffset;
        if (minLength == undefined || start < minLength) {
            minLength = start;
        if (maxLength == undefined || end > maxLength) {
            maxLength = end;
    var length = maxLength - minLength;
    $.writeln(length);
But this approach seems to be a little less precise than creating outlines since (I guess) it measures up to the beginning of the last character; discretionary hyphens, line brakes, etc. are not included into the measurement.