Problem writing small text at an angle

[hedles]

In another post in the troubleshooting category, I recently wrote

BTW, the reason I needed to use the levels adjustment was to darken the text after it had been rotated, because it tends to blur when you do this and is nothing like so readable. Is there any way to write text at an angle in the first place? (Has to be any number of degrees, not just 15 deg increments to be any use for my application.) Also is there any way to keep text completely black, both when you write it and when you rotate it?

What I am trying to do is to add road names to a street map. The nature of the task is such that

1. I need to cover as much area as is feasible in each map/file

2. I need to get in quite a lot of detail on the maps

3. the final map files need to be small enough to easily transmit by e-mail

Obviously, there is something of a trade-off between these three objectives. One of the results is that the text I write the street names in has to be a fairly small point size - around 8 pt text is what I am using.

That, in itself is no problem, but because roads don't all come obligingly East to West, i.e. horizontal on the map, I need to be able to write the text at any random angle.

The snag is, when I use the Layer rotate/zoom tool, the pixels in the text get 'blended'(? = smoothed out by adding grey pixels at the edges) and because of the small point size, this makes the text almost unreadable- joining letters together and filling in loops etc.

I've tried using various adjustments and effects (e.g. the Levels adjustment and the sharpen effect) to tidy up the result but it is a very long process to get an acceptable result and I usually end up editing the output on a pixel by pixel basis.

Is there any simple way either to write text (in pure black) at predefined an angle or to stop the blending effect as an object (the text) is rotated?

Or can anyone suggest a better way of doing this?

Ideally, what I'd like is the ability to be able to write text at any angle or, better still, along any predefined curve (roads are not alway straight!). Would anybody else find such a plugin of use? I don't have a clue how to go about writing one right now.

At present, I'm actually finding it quicker (but still too time-consuming), easier and producing a better (but still far from a good) result to create the text in MS Excel (text in any cell can be written at any angle with single degree increments), then to capture the output from the screen as a .jpg, import this into PDN and then merge it down onto the map!

Thanks for any advice.

BTW I've had a search through most of the plugins that are published here but I haven't seen anything that I think might help.

[Ash]

Dup the text layer, and you should see the text get draker and more readable again, merge layer down when done.

Repeat if needed.