Getting glyph positions from a document

Getting glyph positions from a document

Greetings.  I have a problem.  Here's the effect I want to achieve:
I'd like to be able to create thumbnails of pages with certain
characters/words/phrases hilighted (as with multiple colored
markers).  These thumbnail hilights will change dynamically as the
corresponding full-size pages' hilights change.  (Those hilights would
be set programatically.)  There might be anywhere from 10-50 pages,
all of whose thumbnails would be displayed simultaneously.  Taking
pictures of the big pages and shrinking them on the fly is not
feasible--there are too many of them and the system has to work at
interactive speeds (plus shrunken text looks pretty bad).

What (I believe) this needs is the bounding boxes of all the glyphs in
the document.  I'm imagining that I could run a file through an
interpreter and have it throw off glyph rectangles as it rendered each
character.  I'd save the rectangles in an array and be set to go.  But
I'm speaking largely from ignorance, here.

I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.  I've been trying to crack
it for some time now using Word's API as well as .Net controls, to no
avail.

Many thanks.

Ed

Getting glyph positions from a document

Greetings.  I have a problem.  Here's the effect I want to achieve:
I'd like to be able to create thumbnails of pages with certain
characters/words/phrases hilighted (as with multiple colored
markers).  These thumbnail hilights will change dynamically as the
corresponding full-size pages' hilights change.  (Those hilights would
be set programatically.)  There might be anywhere from 10-50 pages,
all of whose thumbnails would be displayed simultaneously.  Taking
pictures of the big pages and shrinking them on the fly is not
feasible--there are too many of them and the system has to work at
interactive speeds (plus shrunken text looks pretty bad).

What (I believe) this needs is the bounding boxes of all the glyphs in
the document.  I'm imagining that I could run a file through an
interpreter and have it throw off glyph rectangles as it rendered each
character.  I'd save the rectangles in an array and be set to go.  But
I'm speaking largely from ignorance, here.

I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.  I've been trying to crack
it for some time now using Word's API as well as .Net controls, to no
avail.

Many thanks.

Ed