[DVIPDFMx] About \Rotate 90 command in PDF files

[Jin-Hwan Cho]

On Jun 2, 2008, at 1:53 AM, Matthias.Franz at ujf-grenoble.fr wrote:

> Hi ChoF,
>
> some comments and thoughts:
>
> 1) I'm not sure that I understand the purpose of \Rotate.
> The PDF 1.2 spec says that it is for rotating on displays.
> I understand this. Later specs say it's also for printing.
> In this case, what is the difference to a rotated bbox???

What do you mean with "rotated bbox"? Is it in the PDF spec?
Anyway, I understood that "\Rotate" gives an information how
many degree the page must be rotated. That's quite simple.

> 2) Possible values of \Rotate must be multiples of 90.
> Hence, no weird things can happen.

You are right. I forgot to check the PDF reference.

> 3) As you've written, it's not a problem of dvipdfmx, but
> of the graphics driver. What should the driver do?
> I think one needs a new option for \includegraphics
> because there are situations where one wants to respect
> \Rotate (inclusion of a wide table which uses landscape
> format instead of portrait format) and situations where
> one doesn't (pdfpages putting 2 pages onto 1 page, like
> psnup. Here one cannot rotate one page, but not the others.)

My opinion was not to use any extra option. So if one includes
a PDF image with /Rotate 90, then the LaTeX graphics driver
must notice this information. How? I thought that the only way
is to add the information on the ".xbb" file. Then the driver makes
a rotated box. In this case the driver does not need to give this
information to dvipdfmx, because dvipdfmx can check this information
by itself. The critical part is the driver's one, not dvipdfmx's.

> 4) What does pdflatex do?

Of course pdflatex does well because it can read the "/Rotate"
information directly and make an appropriate box.

Best, ChoF.