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From: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: PostScript/TrueType Question
Message-ID: <70500038@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Sep 90 15:37:00 GMT
References: <6327@hub.ucsb.edu>
Lines: 21
Nf-ID: #R:hub.ucsb.edu:6327:m.cs.uiuc.edu:70500038:000:941
Nf-From: m.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Sep 22 10:37:00 1990


Postscript has built-in support for device-independent rotation of all
the graphics primitives.  I find it very useful to put labels on
rotated lines.  The Mac does not have primitives to do this, and my
understanding is that system 7.0 will not include support for
rotation.  This is a major drawback, because

  (1) Many applications (such as Canvas) try to kluge rotation and
	screw it up;
  (2) There is no standard representation of rotated text, hence,
	rotated text cannot be stored on the clipboard.
  (3) Rotated text is important for labeling edges in graph-theory
	graphs, and axes (90 degrees) in data graphs.

In my opinion, this is the biggest failing in system 7.0; it's a good
reason to go out an put down $3340 on a new 15MIPS NeXT machine!  8-)


Don W. Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies