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

[Thomas Schneider]

Gordon:

> 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.

I don't have a fully clear picture of what you want, but probably it's
the kind of thing that can be done pretty easily in the language
PostScript.  (I'm sure there are others, this one I know.)  PostScript
converts directly to PDF and is quite efficient.  It's a full stack
language.

>From LaTeX one can call PostScript using pstricks.  I've done some
pretty cool stuff that way so it might be worth checking out.

http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi/

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  schneidt at mail.nih.gov
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms