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From: deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Ben Haller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Rotated text on the Mac
Message-ID: <1991May4.231054.12945@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 4 May 91 23:10:54 GMT
References: <2898@istop.ist.CO.UK>
Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root)
Organization: Stick Software
Lines: 33

In article <2898@istop.ist.CO.UK> jh@ist.CO.UK (Jeremy Huxtable) writes:
>Can I tell if ATM or TrueType are installed?
>Can I use them to draw rotated text, falling back on bitmap rotation
>as a last resort?

  Well, ATM can obviously draw rotated text.  TrueType, however, cannot,
making ATM (IMHO) the vastly superior product.  ATM can, in fact, draw a
string in any affine-transform-generated coordinate system.
  I think Apple's official line on this sad failing of TrueType is
something like "The average user doesn't need that kind of technology, so
we leave providing that functionality to third-party products [such as
ATM]"  There goes any chance of a standard.  And of course the average user
becomes even more confused - "Why does my Mac have the 'Rotate' command
disabled in the menu, and *his* Mac has it enabled?"  etc.  Actually, I
think the average user could probably find lots of uses for rotated fonts.
But never mind.
  Yet another thing Mac programmers have to check for the presence of, and
then special-case...

>The ideal method would be to get the path information back from ATM/TrueType
>but I assume that this is impossible because the manufacturers wish to
>protect their fonts.

Well, I've heard that ATM 2.0 lets other programs get the outline for a
given character/string, but I've never seen any hard evidence for this,
so who knows.  TrueType doesn't let you do this, to the best of my
knowledge.

-Ben Haller (deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu)
"The man from the government
 The man from the tax board
 The man from the public school
 The man owns the Golden Rule..." - Jane's Addiction