[texhax] Curved text? (was: Diagonal text?)

[David Carlisle]

On 3 February 2016 at 17:20, Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> It would also be nice to have some forms of `curve' text, i.e. something like:
>
>                         n
>                   i           T
>               a                    e
>            l                          X
>          p                              p
>         X                                l
>          e                               a
>            T                            i
>                                        n
>
> Possible?  I suppose so, but tricky...




not particularly tricky to get that output but some input forms are
trickier than others.
packages like tikz or pstricks (both of which can be used with plain)
will let you write text along an arbitrary path (so a sine curve or
logarithmic spiral or anything else you specify.
But whether you consider it to be "plain tex"  after you've loaded
thousands of lines of tikz is a matter of judgement:-)

Simpler is just to get that output by specifying each letter's
position by coordinate.
That is essentially trivial, something like

\leavevmode
\rlap{\smash{\kern20pt\raise 30pt\hbox{a}}}%
\rlap{\smash{\kern40pt\raise 20pt\hbox{b}}}%

will place "a" at (20,30) and "b" at (40,20)

that is essentially the basis of latex's picture mode.

David