[texhax] Placing text in a graphical manner (bad description, sorry)

[Gordon Haverland]

It's Tuesday night, and I need to come up with stuff for Thursday 
afternoon.  My engineering association is running a science night 
for younger students.  And there is insufficient materials 
components to the the presentations.

I've got a very tough audience, nominally grade 3 to grade 7 
students.  And their parents.

Not all elements are found as solids in engineering applications.  
And there is the odd solid compound (multiple elements) that is of 
interest.

What I am thinking of, is the name of the element (or compound) is 
rotated 90 degrees (clockwise), and is printed where the baseline 
(or midline) of the logarithm of the density would place it.

To do this in a single line, would have too many terms overwriting 
each other, so I expect a person needs to have multiple lines of 
this kind of data, and a person picks and chooses what solids go 
in which lines of data.

Has anything like this ever been done in LaTeX?

The high end is osmium at almost 22.5.  The least dense are 
aerogels at around 0.0008 (hence the logarithmic scale).  (I'm 
also doing number density, which runs from almost 200 to 0.02.)

I am thinking any given "row" is a minipage, and one stacks up 
minipages to whatever level.  And one places data in each minipage 
to try and avoid overwriting as much as possible.

Thanks.  Sorry for being so imprecise.

Gord