Just posting your response for archiving purposes:
"You might want to try using roScreen instead, draw text to a bitmap or region and then drawRotatedObject to the screen."
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I did consider using that but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work with Layers in roCanvas. As soon as SetLayer was called it would put it on top of the roScreen object and hide it.
For now I am processing the text on an external server running php and returning it as an image. This isn't ideal but it works for a small title.
Here is the php code for anyone interested.
// Set the content-type
header( 'Content-Type: image/png' );
// the text
$text = 'This is a long title for a poster. Does it look good? I think it does ... wonder if it will wrap?';
// font of your choice
$font = 'myfont.ttf';
// instantiate the image
$im = imagecreatetruecolor( 67, 720 );
imagesavealpha( $im, true );
imagealphablending( $im, true );
// color
$white = imagecolorallocate( $im, 255, 255, 255 );
// transparent color specified by the alpha 127
$black = imagecolorallocatealpha( $im, 0, 0, 0, 127 );
// fill image with transparent color
imagefill( $im, 0, 0, $black );
// create the text
imagettftext( $im, 25, 90, 45, 700, $white, $font, $text );
// output image
imagepng( $im );
// clean up
imagedestroy( $im );
