[OS X TeX] Undesired Rotated Figure in PSTricks

[Ross Moore]

Hi Bruno,

On 18/05/2005, at 8:06 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 18 mai 05 à 11:43, Bruno Voisin a écrit :
>
>> Eureka! That works.
>
> On the other hand I tried also to open the intermediary .ps file, 
> created by TeXShop in the process .tex -> .dvi -> .ps -> .pdf, 
> directly in the Finder. This uses Apple's built-in distiller 
> /usr/bin/pstopdf, and yields the same result as originally before 
> modifying ps2pdfwr: automatic rotation of the page, becoming 
> landscape.
>
> Thus it seems automatic rotation is more or less established as a 
> standard,

No.
You can read a bit about it in the Ghostscript documentation;
e.g.
      /usr/local/share/ghostscript/8.13/doc/  (or similar location)
in the files:
     History6.htm   and  Ps2pdf.htm

That it doesn't appear until  History6.htm  indicates that it is a quite
recent addition. (It also appears in  History4.htm  with a comment that
it doesn't actually do anything yet!)

It's described as an "Acrobat Distiller" parameter; i.e. provided
only because Acrobat has such a feature.

Here is an extract from  Ps2pdf.htm

>> By default Ghostscript determines viewing page orientation based on 
>> the dominant
>> text orientation on the page. Sometimes, when the page has text in 
>> several
>> orientations or has no text at all, wrong orientation can be selected.
>>
>> <p>
>> Acrobat Distiller parameter <b><tt>AutoRotatePages</b></tt> controls 
>> the
>> automatic orientation selection algorithm. On Ghostscript, besides
>> input stream, Distiller parameters can be given as command line 
>> arguments.


To my mind, this is fine when Ghostscript is being used to generate
full pages. However  gs  is also used to handle single images within
larger documents, for which the concept of "dominant text orientation"
is just not applicable.

For example, what if you want a single sideways rotated word or letter,
or just a clipped part of a letter --- easy enough to program in 
PostScript,
but Ghostscript seems to want to turn it back to upright.


Personally I think it quite wrong that  AutoRotatePages  is turned on 
by default
in Ghostscript generally, so now needs to be explicitly set to /None in 
scripts
that had been working quite fine before this "feature" appeared.


> and by changing it in the scripts ps2pdf (of GS) and epstopdf (of TeX) 
> we might break what a user coming from a non-TeX background would 
> expect to be the default: automatic rotation.

It may indeed be expected by Acrobat users, in non-scripted settings, 
say.

> It might then make sense to keep automatic rotation as the default for 
> both ps2pdf and epstopdf, but provide easy switches for the user to 
> modify this default on a per-file basis or in a pref file.

I would say that users of these generally do *not* expect to see 
auto-rotation.
This can cause quite unexpected results, as has been reported here 
previously.



Hope this helps,

	Ross


>
> Bruno Voisin
>
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Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia                                  fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
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