QGIS » QGIS Application

One new feature that would be good is the support of label rotation in the composer.

For the moment you can rotate pictures and shapes when you compose a map ! But you can't do this with labels...

If you look into .qpt files (QGis Composer Template files), you can see that the label definition has got a rotation attribute. If you try to modify it directly in the file, it does nothing: the label is still displayed with no rotation.

Here is an extract from a .qpt file:

<ComposerLabel labelText="TITRE" margin="0">
  <LabelFont description="DejaVu Sans,18,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0"/>
  <FontColor red="0" blue="0" green="0"/>
  <ComposerItem width="25.49839762376757" x="390.5356783919598" y="13.11658291457286" rotation="0" height="11.22057304872989" frame="false" outlineWidth="0" zValue="1" lastValidViewScaleFactor="1.98812351543943" positionLock="false">
   <FrameColor alpha="255" red="0" blue="0" green="0"/>
   <BackgroundColor alpha="255" red="255" blue="255" green="255"/>
  </ComposerItem>
 </ComposerLabel>

As you can see, the rotation attribute value of the ComposerItem is fixed to 0. If you change it manually, it does nothing.
As it is already coded in the .qpt "vocabulary", I guess that it could be possible to use this attribute to support label rotation. Then, IMHO, I think that we can focus on building a rotation routine in the composer code that use this attribute...