On Thu, 03 Jun 2004 07:30:04 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Cherokee _is_ -- you must've meant Cree. But do you want your typography
> subsystem to have to rotate characters? Rotating seems to be a very
> memory-intensive procedure.

Sorry; I respectfully disagree about rotating characters.

I have a 233 MHz Pentium II machine with a Matrox Mystique 4 MB graphics
card (both items mean it's years old...), and 128 MB (better...) of
memory. My machine will rotate a 1024 x 768 image by a quarter turn in a
few milliseconds, so rotating a tiny character (or a few hundred) by a
quarter turn (easy) should cause no perceptible delays.

Back when 64 kB of RAM was a luxury, rotating a big image by a quarter
turn might have taken seconds; not now. I'd be very surprised if rotating
a character takes as much as four times the RAM needed to hold its bitmap,
and the memory to hold the necessary instructions is insignificant in a
modern application.

The excellent freeware graphics program IrfanView will rotate a
full-screen image by any angle (specifiable to 0.01 degree) in no more
than a few seconds (with no noticeable deterioration, as well). That's a
more-difficult task. It rotates the reduced-size Before and After
"thumbnails" too fast to see.

===

As to computer typography, I keep hoping for being able to combine
modifier diacritics with the character they modify, in something like a
multilingual editor. "Overstruck" characters, such as one could do so
easily in a typewriter, don't seem to be even thought about, although
doing that is really easy, basically; it's no more than a Boolean logical
inclusive-OR of their respective bitmaps, to be somewhat technical.

My regards to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Opera 7.5 (3778), using M2