Rotated Text

[Josh Davenport]

Thanks James.

I'll report back if I get anywhere.

Josh

On Jun 11, 2008, at 12:33 PM, James Rea wrote:

>> All works well, except that the Test labels across the top take up
>> too much space. I can make them vertical, of course, but not with the
>> text rotated.
>> I COULD make any array for the top, and use 26 picts for the letters,
>> rotated, and show the correct pict based on the data, but I would
>> prefer not to.
>>
>> Any ideas to do this dynamically? Say, through applescript, or
>> something? There is an applescript hook into "Image Events" that can
>> rotate an image, but how do I generate an image of some text?
>
> Here is a possible advanced technique you might investigate.
>
> Last summer Panorama support was added for Perl, Ruby, Python and PHP.
> At the time I did some research on these languages and the standard
> libraries available for them. I was quite excited to discover that PHP
> has a standard library, the GD extension, that can create images
> dynamically, including rotated text.
>
> Unfortunately, it turns out that Apple did not include the GD  
> extension
> in their version of PHP -- at least in Tiger. At the time, Leopard
> wasn't out yet, and I haven't had a chance to check if it is now
> supported. If it is included, it should be relatively easy to generate
> the images you want on the fly. If it's any help, I found  
> information on
> this library starting on page 225 of the book "Programming PHP" from
> O'Reilly (Chapter 9). As I recall you can find out what libraries are
> installed with the phpinfo( function, see page 10 of that book.
>
> If Apple didn't include the GD Library in Leopard it would still be
> possible, though quite a bit more difficult. Since PHP is open source
> you could compile it yourself with the GD Library included. I haven't
> done that myself so I can't provide directions, but I know that it can
> definitely be done.
>
> Along the same vein, I'm sure that there are libraries available for
> Perl, Ruby and/or Python to do the same thing. There are hundreds  
> if not
> thousands of libraries available for these languages, so I'm not
> familiar with all or even most of them. There are directories  
> available
> for each language, so I would start there.
>
> Jim Rea
> President, ProVUE Development
>
> P.S. I just checked, and if I am reading the output of the phpinfo()
> function correctly it unfortunately appears that the GD library is  
> still
> not included in Leopard. Perhaps there is some licensing issue, maybe
> the GD library has a GPL license. So unfortunately it will take some
> extra work to get this working.
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