[PyMOL] raytraced labels

[Ingo P. K. <kor...@wz...>]

hello everybody,

shouldn't it be possible to extract the proper rotation for the cgo
labels
from the view matrix ?

i have been trying arount a few things, but was not so succesful so far.

my idea was, to

- extract the coordinates of the atom i want from the pdb file. either
from within pymol or in an external python script.
- put a label at those positions
- move the label to the origin.
- apply the inverse of the rotational part of the view matrix
- move the label back to were it came from
- and then adjust the wee little offsets for better image clarity
manually (try and error, as in molscript).

or is that not possible ?

from what i have seen, i can not apply a matrix directly to the cgo
objects,
but would have to convert the matrix to three succesive rotations around
x, y and z.

also, moving the label to the origin, rotating and moving it back
afterwards
did not have quite the effect i was anticipating. i.e., it looked the
same, as rotating in place.
in particular, the label got moved a significant way off ...

would anybody have any insights he would like to share ...

putting in the labess in illustrator or gimp afterwards is way too
cumbersome ...

1000 thanks for your help

ingo