[texhax] [solved] Curved text?

[Rodolfo Medina]

David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle at gmail.com> writes:

> On 3 February 2016 at 17:20, Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> It would also be nice to have some forms of `curve' text, i.e. something
>> like:
>>
>>                         n
>>                   i           T
>>               a                    e
>>            l                          X
>>          p                              p
>>         X                                l
>>          e                               a
>>            T                            i
>>                                        n
>>
>> Possible?  I suppose so, but tricky...
>
>
>
>
> not particularly tricky to get that output but some input forms are
> trickier than others.
> packages like tikz or pstricks (both of which can be used with plain)
> will let you write text along an arbitrary path (so a sine curve or
> logarithmic spiral or anything else you specify.
> But whether you consider it to be "plain tex"  after you've loaded
> thousands of lines of tikz is a matter of judgement:-)
>
> Simpler is just to get that output by specifying each letter's
> position by coordinate.
> That is essentially trivial, something like
>
> \leavevmode
> \rlap{\smash{\kern20pt\raise 30pt\hbox{a}}}%
> \rlap{\smash{\kern40pt\raise 20pt\hbox{b}}}%
>
> will place "a" at (20,30) and "b" at (40,20)
>
> that is essentially the basis of latex's picture mode.
>
> David


Thanks!  What you suggest seems to do what I'm looking for:

\leavevmode
\rlap{\smash{\kern0pt\raise 0pt\hbox{1}}}%
\rlap{\smash{\kern3pt\raise 3pt\hbox{2}}}%
\rlap{\smash{\kern7pt\raise 7pt\hbox{3}}}%
\rlap{\smash{\kern12pt\raise 8pt\hbox{5}}}%

Best, thanks all.

Rodolfo