[futurebasic] Re: Rotated Text

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From: tedd <tedd@...>
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 13:23:31 -0400
>Hi Tedd,
>
>I downloaded both your rotated text routines (thank you). The one which is
>done by drawing the string to GWorlds seems a bit complex.  The routine
>which places text on the printer rotated at any angle seems to me should
>also work on the screen...or is that wishful thinking. It works as
>advertised to create rotated text from my printer but no way can I get it
>to do the same thing on the screen.  It seems to me that if a routine is
>capable of rotating text for output to the printer it should be capable of
>generating output to the screen.  Am I stuck with the gWorlds solution for
>screen usage?
>
>Regards,
>
>Dale

Dale:

You are doing two different things when trying to print rotated text to the
screen as compared to the printer.

When printing text to the printer, you are using PICOMMENTS -- which are
(somebody correct me if I'm wrong) commands similar to postscript. It is a
way to communicate with postscript printers. In the olden days, I had to
learn postscript and then send postscript commands to my printer via a
BASIC wrapper to have it do what I wanted -- it was very complex. However,
now with PICOMMENTS, one just uses those commands you want and everything
is much easier.

When printing text to the screen, it is a completely different critter.
Printing text horizontally is default. You see, text characters are somehow
linked with the ASCII text so that they magically appear on the screen when
you do something like PRINT "This is my text". In other words, somewhere
something goes and grabs a "T" screen character and places it on the screen
when you do a PRINT "T". Unfortunately, this something does not have a
screen character for inclined text. In other words, it, and subsequently
you, don't have the ability to grab a "T" character that is inclined 30
degrees and place in on the screen. Too bad -- it would be nice to have
commands something like the old Apple plotters. But, it don't.

So, what I did was to use offscreen GWorld to print a string of text and
then rotate the image to the incline desired and place it on the screen. It
looks complicated because it is. So, yes you're stuck with GWorlds for text
rotation to the screen.

It would be nice if text rotation was incorporated into some future version
of FB^3 -- hint.. hint!

tedd

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