"sideways" for unix?

[Wolf N. Paul]

In article <2420 at ssc-vax.UUCP> ray3rd at ssc-vax.UUCP (Ray E Saddler III) writes:
>In article <446 at uncle.UUCP>, jbm at uncle.UUCP (John B. Milton) writes:
>> In article <9 at ylwpig.UUCP> jep at ylwpig.UUCP (James E. Prior) writes:
>> >In article <565 at whizz.uucp> bbh at whizz.uucp (Bud Hovell) writes:
>> >>Can anyone say if there is a program for unix machines which allows
>> >>sideways printing of very wide docs (e.g. spreadsheets)?
>> Well, that depends on your resources. As it turns out, there was a WONDERFUL
>> program posted to csu or csm, called "rot". It will rotate text around every
>> way you can possibly think of.
>I was going to suggest 'rot' also, but then I realized tht Sideways
>(tm) actually rotates the text characters as well as the string, so
>I beleive there's a lot more looking out ther to do.

Actually, any program to accomplish that would be either very printer specific
or come with lots of printer drivers.

What these programs do is either (a) perform something similar to rot, and 
then bitmap the resulting page in the printer's graphics mode; or (b) down-
load a font of sideways characters to the printer, and then print a "rot"ed
version of the file.

If your printer supports downloading of characters, and if you have a way of
creating a download font for that printer, just create a font in which all
characters are rotated 90 degrees, download it, and then use rot to print
your file, sending escape sequences to adjust the line spacing if necessary.

Such a font would have to be monospaced (all characters the same width), since
the "width" of these sideways characters becomes the line spacing of your
rotated text, and you want them all to line up nicely.

If I get it done, I might shortly post a simple program designed to create
Epson LQ compatible fonts by editing each character bitmap as an ascii
textfile, and then combining them into a font file which can just be "cat"ed
to the printer.
-- 
Wolf N. Paul * 3387 Sam Rayburn Run * Carrollton TX 75007 * (214) 306-9101
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