Diagonal text (n.2)

[Herbert Voss]

Rodolfo Medina schrieb:
> Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> writes:
>
>> On 26/05/2019 14:52, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
>>> Hi all.
>>>
>>> Very simple in LaTeX:
>>>
>>>   https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/example-of-rotated-text-in-latex/fkmpsbztrxmv
>>>
>>> but how about the same in plain TeX?  I suppose box rotating is
>>> involving,
>>> but in TeXBook I don't see anything about \hboxes or \vboxes
>>> rotation...
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help,
>>>
>>> Rodolfo
>>
>> Rotation requires \special's, which therefore don't get mentioned in The
>> TeXbook. One could do the grind oneself, but easier is to use the
>> generic
>> ability of the LaTeX graphicx package:
>>
>> \input graphicx %
>> \rotatebox{45}{foo}
>> \bye
>
>
> Thanks, Philip and Joseph.  The solution proposed by Joseph works fine
> although, as pointed out by Philip:
>
>         "There is (to the best of my belief) no specification of rotation
> in
>         the DVI specification, and therefore pure TeX could never
> accomplish
>         such a thing."
>
> ...the result is seen in the final PDF output but not in dvi.  In fact,
> when
> opening the simple above example in xdvi, it says:
>
> $ xdvi test
> xdvi: Warning: PS code on page 1 may contain rotation, which is not
> supported by xdvi

A lot of the dvi viewers cannot show the rotations.

Herbert