Re: Text rotation

[Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 11:43 -0600, Jim Clark wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> My 2 mini-euros worth. I use text rotation in Dia all the time. How?
>
> Well, I never use Dia diagrams as my final format. I always export to
> png and use those in my web pages. And fire up Gimp to do my final
> touch up. It is easier to crop to the dimensions I need, clean up a
> messy arrow, or move text over a pixel or two. I can easily rotate
> text (or anything else) in Gimp.
>
> So all this anguish seems misplaced to me. Dia is not a text, or
> graphics, manipulation program.

Dia is a diagramming program, indeed.  Part of diagramming well is being
able to label your arrows well.  For a slanted or vertical arrow,
rotated text looks a lot better.  While your solution with Gimp may
solve the problem for your needs, lot of people use other forms of
output, such as Postscript, SVG or LaTeX, where rotating the text can be
messy.  There's definitely also something to be said for avoiding the
roundtrip to another program for final touch-up.  That's why I think
rotated text is important to get in Dia, even more so than pattern fill
and shadows (alas, it is also harder than those).

-Lars