As you can see in this image, I am trying to find the minimum height needed to enclose a string of text rendered in a certain freetype font. From the picture, you can see that this is different than finding the max glyph height. I have been frustrated to my end's wits trying to do this with my current font face's global metrics. I have noticed some really weird things... such as the fact that the global height does not seem to depend on the font size I set.. Basically to prevent confusion I'll begin from where I originally started. For drawing my text I basically do.... for( int i = 0; i < someText.glyphs.size(); i++ ) { draw( glyph.bitmap, MouseX + someText.glyphs.relativeX + someText.glyphs.left, MouseY - someText.top ); //no need to use someText.glyphs.relativeY since it is always zero } This seems to render correctly, the problem is setting the minimum height for my text background. If I just do draw( background.bitmap, mouseX, mouseY ) my background shows up exactly below the baseline of the font.. ( this means for the string "abcj", the top of my background is located right below the letters a, b, and c although the letter j partially goes into it. )

well I developed a way to do it by iterating over each possible glyph whenever I set a font size and determining the max y and min y positions. This had been something I wanted to avoid, but I suppose if this only happens on size changes, any worries about this being less efficient are not that huge.