[Linux-users] Rotation of PDF files

[Michael Hipp]

Bill Campbell wrote:
> I have a problem faxing PDF files created by a Windows program
> (Crystal Reports I think) in that they are basically landscape,
> but don't have the text rotated appropriately to print on letter
> size paper.
> 
> We're using HylaFAX which uses the ghostscript pdf2ps program to
> convert prior to converting to the fax tiff format.  I haven't
> been able to find an option that will cause this to rotate the
> text appropriately.

I ran into a similar problem when trying to print ReportLab pdf 
documents in Python. After griping on the ReportLab list that it wasn't 
properly flagging the documents as landscape, they educated me that pdf 
has no such thing, only dimensions, and it's up to the reader or printer 
to know how to rotate things so they appear properly on the output 
device. Adobe Acrobat does this well; most of the OSS pdf stuff seems 
not to.

I ended up having to give the appropriate flags to ghostscript by 
knowing *beforehand* which docs needed to be printed landscape.

All I can offer is to look closely at every available option to pdf2ps 
or Hyla and see if there is something like a "--landscape" option.

I've learned to loathe pdf.

Michael