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Satisfying rotated text needs

    Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1992 09:44 EST
    From: robert futrelle <futrell@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu>

    The most common technical graphic in the world
    is the x,y data graph. Labeling the vertical
    axis of such a plot needs +90 degree rotated
    text.  Implementing that (soon!) would satisfy
    98% of the people asking about rotated text.
    90 degree rotated text looks excellent with bit-mapped
    fonts of course.

CLIM:DRAW-VERTICAL-STRING will at least get you part way to having a
reasonably labelled vertical axis.

    Oblique (non-90-degree rotated) text is used to
    a much lesser extent, as in labeling of edges
    of arc-node graphs, though some like to label
    them with horizontal text.

    As far as Postscript output goes, PS doesn't care,
    as far as I know, what transformation you apply.

PostScript allows arbitrary rotation of text.

    I vote for getting 90 degree text done real soon.
    It is just a bit-remap, interchanging x and y
    (and getting the signs right).  Should not be
    a big deal.

It would have to be done in each back-end.  CLIM proper doesn't get to
think about bits.  In some cases the back-end doesn't even have access
to the bits of the image for the character, it just tells the host
window system what characters (in what font) to plunk down where.  If
the host can't rotate then the back end would have to draw bits itself,
with little clue about how to maintain stylistic coherence with the
unrotated text that was drawn.  If the problem were easy it would have
been solved by now.

    We deal with the biomedical literature and screen
    versions of it.  They only publish about 1,000,000
    distinct data plots a year.  Maybe we could start
    saving some trees if we could move their stuff
    to our silver screens.

    bob futrelle

       Prof. Robert P. Futrelle
       Biological Knowledge Laboratory
       College of Computer Science  161CN
       Northeastern University
       360 Huntington Ave.
       Boston, MA 02115

       (617)-437-2076   FAX: (617)-437-5121
       Internet: futrelle@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu
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