johnl@walt.cc.utexas.edu (John Lange) (09/27/90)
Surely someone has run into this problem before. How do you get both horizontal and vertical fonts on printers such as the HP Laserjet from MS Windows? I know the DEVCAPS claim that almost nothing can do rotated text, even to the screen. However, I wrote a routine to do vertical text to the screen, and it looks quite nice. The secret was to write the text to a bitmap, rotate the bitmap, and then put the bitmap on the screen. This technique won't work with most printers since the fonts are not necessarily on the computer at all. Still, being the perfectionist that I am, I desire to have horizontal and vertical fonts on the printed page at one time, regardless of the destination printer. I know it can be done because MATLAB (the math package) does it. I did notice that MATLAB comes with a font file specifically for the Laserjet. They must be doing some fancy bit manipulation since the Laserjet (at least the old ones) don't allow both landscape and portrait fonts at the same time. I would prefer not to use vector fonts since they don't really look as nice. Anyway, if you know of anyone who has climbed this mountain before, please let me know. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. John Lange voice: 512-454-4797
cgordon@vpnet.chi.il.us (Gordon Hlavenka) (09/29/90)
>Surely someone has run into this problem before. How do you get both >horizontal and vertical fonts on printers such as the HP Laserjet >from MS Windows? WordPerfect will print mixed text orientations. The trick is to place the different rotations in WP "boxes" and rotate the boxes. WP has a (semi-)WYSIWYG screen function which displays the rotations. The screen appearance of the fonts is determined by a complicated description in the printer setup file. Unfortunately, WP will only rotate the text if the _printer_ is capable of it. Since WP will graphically create unusual characters on any graphics-capable printer I wouldn't be surprised to find a couple of generic rotatable fonts graphically produced in a future rev. This isn't really a Windows solution, since WP isn't a Windows program. But WP does run under Windows. A Windows version of WP is rumored... ----------------------------------------------------- Gordon S. Hlavenka cgordon@vpnet.chi.il.us Disclaimer: Yeah, I said it. So what?