How to set word and character spacing for text in PDF created with PDFDoc Scout library

Download example source code: pdfdocscout_example_text_formatting.zip (10,8 KB)

This example demonstrates how to use different word and character spacing text style in generated PDF document with PDFDoc Scout library

Screenshot (view produced pdf):

' create PDFDoc object
Set PDFDoc = CreateObject("PDFDocScout.PDFDocument")
' initialize library
PDFDoc.InitLibrary "demo", "demo"

' set output filename for PDF document
PDFDoc.OutputFileName = "pdfdocscout_example_text_formatting.pdf"
' automatically open generated PDF document in default PDF viewer application
PDFDoc.AutoOpenGeneratedPDF = true

' starts PDF document generation
PDFDoc.BeginDocument

' constant to define font size
Const FontSize = 14

' Set font for drawning text
PDFDoc.Page.SetFont "Arial Black", FontSize, False, False, False, False, 0

' set additional character spacing (space between characters). Default character spacing is zero (0)
' new character spacing factor value should be calculated as (WidthOfSpaceSymbol / FontSizeValue)
' for example you can take "T" character as a reference and add additional space between each character equal to the width of this character. So visual width of the text will be doubled
' so to add additional space to each character you should calculate: PDFDoc.Page.GetTextWidth("T") / FontSize

PDFDoc.Page.SetCharacterSpacing 0
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Character spacing", 100, 150, 0

' now add additional character spacing = width of "T" character
PDFDoc.Page.SetCharacterSpacing PDFDoc.Page.GetTextWidth("T")/FontSize
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Character spacing", 100, 160, 0

' works in the same way as character spacing but for space character only
' so to calculate value to double spaces between words you should calculate: PDFDoc.Page.GetTextWidth(" ") / FontSize

' draw text with default values
PDFDoc.Page.SetCharacterSpacing 0
PDFDoc.Page.SetWordSpacing 0
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Word Spacing", 100, 200, 0

' now double space characters
PDFDoc.Page.SetWordSpacing PDFDoc.Page.GetTextWidth(" ") / FontSize
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Word Spacing", 100, 210, 0

' set Horizontal Scaling
' default value is 100%
' to compress it in 2 times you can set scaling to 50%

' draw default settings (100 horizontal scaling)
PDFDoc.Page.SetCharacterSpacing 0
PDFDoc.Page.SetHorizontalScaling 100
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Scaling", 100, 240, 0

' draw 50% horizontal scaling
PDFDoc.Page.SetHorizontalScaling 50
PDFDoc.Page.AddText "Scaling", 100, 250, 0

' close pdf document generation
PDFDoc.EndDocument

' disconnect from library
Set PDFDoc = Nothing

Download example source code: pdfdocscout_example_text_formatting.zip (10,8 KB)