((int) myChar)?

The glpyh is essentially a tile (depending on how you look at it) which is mapped to an ascii index, in thoery an ascii character could share the same glyph with another ascii character, and the glpyh index for each ascii character can change from font to font, if you're wanting to get dimensions you really need to use the same bunch of code/api that you're using to render, say if you're using GDI+ to render and DX to get values there could be some differences, I use freetype for all my font type stuff, but that's because I use the data from freetype to render as well, what are you using to render text ?