strategies for non-horizontal text orientation

[Richard Gaskin]

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
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com