Re: [matplotlib-devel] mathtext rotation

John Hunter wrote:
> On 8/30/07, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:
> 
>> - FT2Font.draw_glyph_to_bitmap does not support rotation.  This would
>> have to be added, or there may be a way to use
>> set_text/draw_glyphs_to_bitmap which does support rotation.  However,
>> that would make rendering the entire expression to a single buffer much
>> more difficult.
> 
> I was envisioning simply rotating the entire text expression by
> rotating the ft2font pixel buffer.  Agg could do this and still
> preserve subpixel effects, but we would need to expose a little code
> (presumably in the agg SWIG module).  

I was concerned about loss of quality doing the rotation in raster 
space, particularly due to all of the trouble to get the hinting just 
right.  (Though I'm not sure how much hinting to a grid matters when the 
glyphs aren't actually parallel with the grid anymore.)

I suppose it's worth some experimentation, though, as that is definitely 
the path of least resistance.

> One couldn't rotate individual
> glyphs  in a larger expression this way, but by far the most common
> use case is to rotate the entire expression so this limitation doesn't
> concern me much.

Agreed.  My usual response is: TeX doesn't support it, so why should we? ;)

Cheers,
Mike