[comp.windows.ms] Excel 3.0, ATM 1.1 Rotation Bug

kjo@lanl.gov (Karl J Ottenstein) (05/04/91)

There is yet another problem with Excel 3.0 and ATM 1.1 that has not
yet (?) been mentioned on the net:  incorrect text rotation.  I didn't
post this a month ago since I hadn't seen much interest in Excel here.

ATM 1.1 misinterprets rotation codes from Excel 3.0 and rotates text
180 degrees in the *wrong* direction.  For example, rotated X-axis
labels should be rotated counterclockwise and grow up, but are rotated
clockwise and grow down.  Given that the coordinates for the first
character's beginning point are preserved, this results in ugly,
unjustified and clipped text.  I phoned Adobe on 4/5/91 and (after 9
minutes on hold) found that this is a known bug to be fixed in the
next release.  I've got a LJ III and found that the only way to get
around this problem is to disable ATM.  Using the printer fonts (and
removing their aliases from the ATM.INI file) would not get rid of
the problem with ATM enabled.

Adobe explained that Windows 2.x specified a rotation direction with
the rotation code and that 3.0 does not.  They guessed at the rotation
direction and guessed wrong.

One funky thing about the bug is that rotation appears correctly in
the normal Excel sheet/chart views, but incorrectly in preview and
print.  Kind of odd that ATM does one thing in one place and another
elsewhere.

Karl Ottenstein
kjo@lanl.gov