[texhax] Unusual documents (writing on pasture)

[Karl Berry]

Hi Gord,

    writing on pasture

Wow.  Please write an article for TUGboat in the appropriate season
(with photos)!

    I don't know how big the "line" is
    (distance from top of glyph to top of line,
    distance from bottom of "x" to bottom of line,
    inter-glyph spacing).
    Where can a person find this?  

In your case, the interline spacing is going to be text-specific, among
other things.  That is, if the letters you are going to "plant" do not
have any descenders (or ascenders), the interline spacing would be less
than it would be for standard text.

    I am assuming some fixed width font with few fancy features is
    probably best

I wouldn't attempt serifs, for one thing :).

Looking at http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/typewriterfonts.html,
maybe Droid Sans Mono, Inconsolata, even OCR-A does not look too bad
to me for this purpose.

Anyway, choose a font and typeset the text you're thinking of at some
convenient size (1in?) so you can measure the the inter-glyph spacing.
You can play with TeX's interline parameters until you get something
that looks right, and then measure the above-and-below distances.

Hope that makes sense.  If I'm misunderstanding, or more
questions/details needed, just write me ... happy planting, karl