A METHOD FOR DISPLAYING TEXT ON A RENDERING DEVIICE TO ACCURATELY REPRESENT THE TEXT AS IF DISPLAYED ON A TARGET DEVICE

A method and system are disclosed for displaying text in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to a printed output. Characters of a document displayed by a visual display in a computerized text processing system are positioned accurately with respect to the positions they would occupy in a printout of the document. During ordinary typing of English-language text, as text is typed beginning at the left margin and proceeding rightward, text to the left of the current cursor position does not move about, and its intercharacter spacing (kerning) is stable. The invention can be adapted for text processing in languages other than English. In one aspect of the invention, a processor formats a line of text by formatting the line as for output to a target device, scaling the formatted line by a resolution ratio between the target device and a rendering device, and adjusting the scaled formatted line to improve its appearance as displayed on the rendering device by iteratively applying a series of formatting corrections to pairs of adjacent characters in the line.