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From: marcel@cs.caltech.edu (Marcel van der Goot)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Printing in landscape mode
Keywords: landscape
Message-ID: <1990Dec6.205456.13142@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 20:54:56 GMT
References: <1959@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <rcpt.659881417@rw7.urc.tue.nl> <1990Dec6.135120.10637@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu>
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In <1990Dec6.135120.10637@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> Ronald G Stockton
(stockton@kira.uucp) has problems printing in landscape mode.

> then either use \landscape, or \begin{landscape} & \end{landscape}.
> It even accepts these two commands as "valid" but doesn't seem to
> be doing anything with them. At least, xdvi and prdvi are still printing
> the table out in normal, non-landscape format. Any help would be
> appreciated.

When using TeX (or LaTeX) you have to tell TeX how large the text area
is. In plain TeX this is done by adjusting \hsize and \vsize. Presumably,
\landscape, or \begin{landscape} does exactly that for you. This affects
the line breaking and page breaking. However, TeX doesn't care about the
actual physical size of the paper, which is usually larger than the
text area; in fact it has no idea what that size is. Therefore, whether
your output should be printed on 8.5in*11in (letter), 11in*8.5in
(landscape letter), 21cm*(21*\sqrt(2))cm (A4), or whatever other size
you may want, this is not part of the dvi file. For all TeX knows you
are printing on sheets of 15ft square and cut out the page you actually
want. Therefore, your dvi-driver still has to give the proper command
to the printer to choose the right paper size (i.e., print in landscape
mode). At my installation that is done by using the "-L" flag (of
the printing program, not of TeX). I have no idea how to instruct your
dvi-drivers to do this, nor whether they can print in landscape mode
at all.

Also, note that this only applies to printing a whole document in
landscape mode. TeX doesn't help you if you want only part of your
document rotated, but there are some PostScript hacks that can be
included in your TeX source to do this (rotate.tex/rotate.sty).
Of course, that requires a PostScript printer.

					Marcel van der Goot
					marcel@vlsi.cs.caltech.edu