Hi, I need a solution for quite complex problem. Exactly, I need to calculate the number of rectangles that can be placed inside letter/character with given size, considering that all rectangles are the same size, but it(the size) and the letter/character(of some regular specific font) itself can be changed by user(this will be used as webside calculator of signboard price). If describe this graphically, it looks like this:
Any ideas or useful links will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance
This is 2D bin-packing. This page might clear it up a bit: http://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/C.L.Mumford/heidi/Background.html
The wiki page on bin-packing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem has a link to a software package which might come in handy: http://code.google.com/p/caparf/
You are unlucky that this is NP-Hard. You are lucky that this is a widely researched topic and has many approximation algorithms. Most current literature on bin-packing should have some information which should help.
About size of characters:
Print char in bitmap and count black regons