strategies for non-horizontal text orientation

[Roger Guay]

I've done a little experimenting and have come with a somewhat kludgy  
way to accommodate real non-horizontal text. It simply involves making  
a column array of narrow fields that are set to center alignment. A  
simple algorithm for placing the chars of a word into the appropriate  
column and line will result in real text on an angle with a certain  
degree of freedom to control that angle with precision. Works fine for  
me but certainly involves a lot of fields!

HTH,
Roger


On Jun 13, 2009, at 10:00 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:22:36 -0700
> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
> Subject: strategies for non-horizontal text orientation
> To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Message-ID: <4A32F14C.1020900 at fourthworld.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> I have a project which will need to present a grid layout in which the
> columns are narrow but will be identified with text labels.
>
> Ideally these would be at a 45-degree angle, so each could be clearly
> associated with the column they relate to but still be reasonably
> readable.  But at worst I'd accept a fully-vertical orientation.
>
> The speed to generate vertically-oriented text isn't a problem,  
> since I
> could render it offscreen in a list field and make and image of that
> field and set its angle to 90.  But I'd prefer 45 degrees, and that
> means doing each label in its own operation, not the speediest thing  
> in
> the world since I may have up to a hundred or even two hundred  
> labels to
> produce.
>
> But that's not the hard part.  The hardest part is printing.  Argh.
> Printing an image of text will be jaggies-hell compared to the smooth
> appearance of native vector-rendered text.
>
> I suppose I could render the text at 4 times actual size and then  
> resize
> it down for display and printing on the card, but I'm concerned about
> that will alter the appearance, perhaps smoothing the image more than
> would be desirable (I haven't yet experimented with this to have any
> subjective feeling for how it looks).
>
> Any of you doing angled or vertically-oriented text?  Any tips you can
> share?
>
>
> Also, do any of you know of a request in the RQCC for native support  
> of
> non-horizontally oriented text?  I just did a search for "text
> orientation" and came up with many hits but none for that.
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation