Hi,
Actually your question is a good one. One of the reasons I never
finished adding an option to text objects to rotate with respect to the
plot (is this the correct terminology?), not the screen, is that I
wasn't sure of the best way to implement this without making it
hopelessly confusing for the user.
One way is to add a boolean that tells the text object whether or not
the angle is with respect to screen coordinates. In this case,
text_obj.get_rotation() would return the angle in whichever coordinate
system is the active one based on the boolean, unless an option to
get_rotation is specified that would force the angle to the screen
coordinate system (this option would then be used by show methods to
assure they get the correct angle for plotting on the screen).
Similarly, set_rotation would set the angle in the active system. The
disadvantage of this approach is that it can be pretty confusing -
unless you consult the boolean, you don't know what your angle is
measured relative to.
Another approach would be to add a ._rotationPlot variable, as well
as .get_rotationPlot and .set_rotationPlot text-object methods. In this
case, using set_rotation would set the "active" angle to be the screen
angle, while using set_rotationPlot would set the "active" angle to be
the plot angle. The non-active angle would be set to None and show
calls would test for whether or not ._rotation is none, in which case
the screen angle would be calculated from the transform. In this case,
get_rotation and get_rotationPlot would return angles in the respective
system, regardless of which one is "active".
What structure would people prefer?
Another reason I never finished this is that I got confused by some of
the code - there was talk of unitful and unitless rotations and
coordinates. Also, I wasn't sure what to do with objects that inherit
the text object class - namely, text with a dash. It didn't seem it was
worth adding this non-screen rotation functionality to these objects.
If anyone can point me in the right direction on these points, I will
try to finish a patch for this functionality.
Cheers,
David
···
On Wed, 2008-11-05 at 10:28 -0500, Michael Droettboom wrote:
Darn clogged e-mail queue! 
I see you've already addressed my question...
Cheers,
Mike
David Kaplan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just wanted to send a note saying that I committed an additional
> method to the Transforms class that transforms angles. The basic idea
> is to transform an angle at a point to a new angle at the corresponding
> point in the transformed coordinate system. The included method is
> generic and should work well for almost any transform provided that the
> spatial scale isn't too small or too large. Much faster algorithms that
> would work regardless of spatial scale can be found for particular
> transforms, particularly affine transforms, but I haven't added these
> yet.
>
> I also added an example script that shows how to use this method to plot
> text rotated so that it aligns with a line in a figure
> ( text_rotation_relative_to_line.py ).
>
> I initially intended to use this method to give text objects the option
> to be rotated with respect to the plot coordinate system (as opposed to
> the screen coordinate system), but I haven't gotten around to finishing
> this yet.
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
>
>
--
**********************************
David M. Kaplan
Charge de Recherche 1
Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement
Centre de Recherche Halieutique Mediterraneenne et Tropicale
av. Jean Monnet
B.P. 171
34203 Sete cedex
France
Phone: +33 (0)4 99 57 32 27
Fax: +33 (0)4 99 57 32 95
http://www.ur097.ird.fr/team/dkaplan/index.html
**********************************