There are several techniques that can be used to provide text clipping in a graphics package. The clipping technique used will depend on the methods used to generate characters and the requirements of a particular application.
The simplest method for processing character strings relative to a window boundary is to use all-or-none string-clipping strategy. If all of the string is inside the clip window, we keep it. Otherwise, the string is discarded. This procedure is implemented by considering a bounding rectangle around the text pattern. The boundary positions of the rectangle are then compared to the window boundaries, and the string is rejected if there is any overlap. This method produces the fastest text clipping.
An alternative to rejecting an entire character string that overlaps a window boundary is to use the all-or-none character-clipping strategy. Here we discard only those characters that are not completely inside the window. In this case the boundary limits of individual characters are compared to the window. Any character that either overlaps or is outside a window boundary is clipped.
A final method for handling text clipping is to clip the components of of individual characters. We now treat characters in much the same way that we treated lines. If an individual character overlaps a clip window boundary, we clip off the parts of the character that are outside the window.
