Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>
> Nicholas Bodley wrote:
> >
> > It is. IrfanView, a really-good freeware viwer and image processor for
> > M$ Windows, rotates large JPEGs speedily without problems. Countless
> > paint/drawing programs, afaik, can also do it easily. What's more
> > time-consuming is to rotate by an arbitrary angle, but if one regards
> > characters as small images, it takes only microseconds (if that long) to
> > rotate them by a quarter turn, or flip them about vert. or horiz. axes.
>
> But computers don't think of characters as "small images," do they? They
> think of them as type.

Computers don't *think* at all. They simply draw line segments.
Computer programs (written by humans) say, e.g., from point x1,
y1 to point x2, y2 draw a line (or arc). A series of these may
represent lines on a spreadsheet grid or a letter in a font. Only
to a human do the lines have meaning.

--Ph. D.