[Devel] Fixed-width font issues ?

[Sebastien BARRE]

Hi

I wrote a small script to get the size of the bounding box of the digits in 
several so-called "fixed-width" fonts.

I tried the Courier fonts that comes with XFree86 (Courier 10 Pitch 
(c0419bt_.pfb), Bitstream).
http://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/fonts/scaled/Type1/c0419bt_.pfb

For each digit, I got that kind of results (font size 30):
        0: 14 x 18
        1: 13 x 19
        2: 14 x 18
        3: 13 x 18
        4: 13 x 18
        5: 13 x 18
        6: 14 x 18
        7: 12 x 18
        8: 14 x 18
        9: 14 x 18

I'm puzzled. Aren't those fonts supposed to deliver the same width for each 
glyph ?

Then I tried Windows's Courier font (cour.ttf). I had the same kind of 
results, i.e. different width for each digit. Nevertheless, when I tried 
the same kind of test using that font within Microsoft Word, there was no 
such pb, the width was equal for each glyph.

Am I missing something here ?

Thank you