I've been looking for a more elegant solution to the following typesetting problem. Consider those banners found in print media where the text is aligned like:
B I G T E X T
small text small text small text
m o r e m e d i u m t e x t
The font sizes are adjusted so that the height is scaled down for longer lines of text such that each line has equal width. I've written a small script that runs each line separately, compiles, crops the resulting pdf and then \includegraphics each in a table. This gives the desired effect but requires an both an outside script and pdfcrop (which only crops to a white bounding box). Since much of LaTeX is self-aware, I imagine it would be possible to have it recognize the width of a box and scale it appropriately so that any text fits exactly into the desired width.
Any thoughts or ideas on how a pure LaTeX implementation might work?
EDIT As a supplement to the suggested solution by AVB (since large code in comments looks awful), I've posted below the code used so that others may find it easily.
\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}[l]
\resizebox{10cm}{!}{BIG Text} \\
\resizebox{10cm}{!}{small text small text small text} \\
\resizebox{10cm}{!}{Medium Text Medium Text}
\end{table} \end{document}
First, read the TeX FAQ entry titled Changing the space between letters. Depending on your circumstances, the packages and recommendation in that FAQ may suffice.
Also, take a look at the \scalebox and \resizebox commands in the graphicx package. They do what the names imply.