[Linux-users] Rotation of PDF files

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007, Michael Hipp wrote:
>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.

Been there, done that.

I took the time this afternoon to update to Hylafax-4.4.0 in hopes that
that would fix the problem, then spent the better part of an hour reading
shell scripts and ghostscript documentation (again).

When I look at the PDF file using xpdf on CentOS 4.5  and Apple's
Preview.app, it appears as landscape, and when I go to Print->Setup that
also indicates that whatever PDF does to mark it as landscape is correct.

>I've learned to loathe pdf.

I much prefer PostScript, but that's not what the world uses these days --
unfortunately.

Bill
--
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