Bug#118563: tetex-bin: dvips does not rotate

[Hilmar Preusse <hille42@web.de>]

On 07.11.01 Christian T. Steigies (cts@debian.org) wrote:

Hi,

> I am trying to rotate an A0 landscape poster to portrait format. I
> want to scale it down and print a preview on a letter printer and I
> later want to print it on an A0 printer, I think it has to be
> rotated, otherwise part of it is cut-off (the letter preview is cut
> off when its not rotated). I know I had that working a few years
> ago and I am not sure if the problem lies on my end or in dvips.
> The dvips manpage says:
> 
>               You can  also  specify  -t  landscape, which rotates
>               a document by 90 degrees.  To rotate a document whose
>               size is not letter, you can use the -t option twice,
>               once for the page size, and once for landscape.
> However:
> dvips -ta4 -tlandscape  -o postera0.ps postera0.dvi
> This is dvips(k) 5.86d Copyright 1999 Radical Eye Software (www.radicaleye.com) ' TeX output 2001.11.06:1835' -> postera0.ps
> dvips: both landscape and papersize specified:  ignoring landscape
> dvips: warning: -t selected paper may be too small
> 
> a4 is obviously the wrong pagesize, but there is no a0 (nor a1 or a2)
> defined in /etc/texmf/dvips/config.ps.
> 
This has been fixed in teTeX 3.0, the beta version were recently
uploaded to experimental.

> If I add a0 there (which IMHO should be in the config by default in
> the debian package), it still does not work, I can not specify
> both, papersize and landscape, which IMHO is a bug?
> 
> Even when I only use dvips -tlandscape, I get:
> dvips: both landscape and papersize specified:  ignoring landscape
> which I find a little odd, I don't see any environment which would specify
> the papersize?
> 
There is one: The a0poster package itself changes the papersize. The
most recent info page about dvips reads:

  Some LaTeX packages, e.g., `hyperref.sty', write a `papersize'
special into the DVI file.  In this case, you need not and should not
attempt to override it manually.

That means: -t landscape won't work with a0poster. There are some
options in the a0poster package itself, to shrink the size of the
page and rotate the page. At my last tests they didn't work. Can you
confirm this?

BTW: I guess that bug only occuers, when using a0poster. As that
package has been removed from teTeX 2.0.2 I guess, we can close that
bug. The licensing issues were clarified, but Thomas didn't like the
code, so he decided to not reinclude it.

Kind regards,
  Hilmar
-- 
sigmentation fault