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

[Uwe Lück]

Am Dienstag, den 13.11.2012, 21:51 -0700 schrieb Gordon Haverland:
> 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.

As to rotating, the LaTeX graphics/x package provides \rotatebox, 
aware of it? See grfguide.pdf. I do not understand what remains.

Cheers,

    Uwe.