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From: kent@sunfs3.Camex.COM (Kent Borg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Rotated text on the Mac
Message-ID: <2010@camex.COM>
Date: 6 May 91 16:41:52 GMT
References: <2898@istop.ist.CO.UK> <1991May4.231054.12945@agate.berkeley.edu>
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In article <1991May4.231054.12945@agate.berkeley.edu> deadman@garnet.berkeley.edu (Ben Haller) writes:
>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,

That's not what I thought.  I am under the impression that Truetype
can do rotated text just fine, but it is Quickdraw that is holding up
the show.  Do you *really* want type rotated alone?  Wouldn't that be
a horrible kludge?  (Which would prompt unending griping, clogging
this newsgroup.)  We need generalized rotating and antialiasing and
resolution independence and quadratic splines (and a whole lot more),
of *everything*, not just type.  Quickdraw is the place to do it.

I am convinced that Apple is working on a new Quickdraw that is
intended to eventually banish Postscript from the Macintosh community,
that is intended to finally give us a single imaging model for both
printing and screen display.

Does anybody have any Quickdraw hints they can let drop?  (How good is
the design?  What does the schedule look like?  Might we hear
something official next week in San Jose?  And while we are at it,
where is "AppleMail" and the store-and-forward IAC?)


>making ATM (IMHO) the vastly superior product.  ATM can, in fact, draw a
>string in any affine-transform-generated coordinate system.

ATM does this stuff because it can, and it is Adobe's "camel nose
under the tent flap" for Display Postscript.  They are thinking of it
as a generalized approach to screen imaging.

Don't blame the Truetype folks, they did good stuff, blame the
Quickdraw people.  They have some *major* work to do.


>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.

There are supposed to be hooks in Truetype for all this stuff too, but
Apple is only telling font houses and font tool houses about them, the
rest of us have to wait for Quickdraw.


--
Kent Borg                            internet: kent@camex.com   AOL: kent borg
                                            H:(617) 776-6899  W:(617) 426-3577
"We foolishly did not realize that he was stupid."  - April Glasbie 3-20-91