Drawing Text on a Slanted Baseline

One of the Newton 2.x OS Q&As
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Drawing Text on a Slanted Baseline (9/15/93)

Q: Is it possible in the Newton OS to draw text on a slanted baseline? I don't mean italics, but actually drawing a word at a 45 or 60 degree angle and so on. For example, can text be drawn along a line that goes from 10,10 to 90,90 (45 degrees)?

A: The drawing package in the Newton OS supports no calls for rotating text. Note: this is like QuickDraw in the MacOS operating system. In MacOS, the workaround is to draw the text into a bitmap and then rotate the bits; you can do the same on a Newton device. In the Newton OS, we even provide calls to rotate a bitmap in 90 degree increments.

You might consider creating a font having characters that are pre-rotated to common angles (such as 30 or 45 degrees) so that applications could just draw characters rather than actually having to rotate a bitmap.