Rotate single PDF page when viewing

Question

I got a Latex document which renders fine, some content is rotated using the turn environment from the rotate package. Everything works like it should.

Except: It know that it is possible to display a single page in a pdf in another orientation. The document viewer then rotates this page when viewing. This would help the readers of my document to read the turned text.

How is this possible? Perhaps somehow using the pdfpageattr command?

Again: I do not to want to rotate the content, I just want to tell the PDF-Reader that it should rotate the page when displaying.

Answer 1

You can indeed use the pdfpageattr command. You can do it as follows:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
  text

  \pagebreak[4]
  \global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}
  text
\end{document}

This will rotate the second page by 90 degrees. It should be obvious how to get different rotations.

Answer 2

The accepted answer did not work for me, since it rotated all pages in the PDF instead of a single one. I managed to get it to work using the pdflscape package instead, as suggested in this answer:

\usepackage{pdflscape}
...
\begin{landscape}
...
\end{landscape}

I needed this to display figures. Note that, when inside the landscape environment, you must use \linewidth for a figure's width, \textwidth will not work.

Answer 3

A slightly more complete version to the accepted answer would be to create an environment that turns the page back to portrait:

\newenvironment{rotatepage}%
    {\clearpage\pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}}%
    {\clearpage\pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 0}}%

And then \begin{rotatepage} <the content on this page is turned 90°> \end{rotatepage}.

---

But we can extend this further. We might want to use the features provided by the rotating package. And we might use documents that use different margins for odd and even pages. Then an automated solution that turns the page by 90° or 270° respectively would be nice. An example using KOMA script:

\documentclass[twoside]{scrreprt}
\usepackage{scrextend,rotating}

\makeatletter
\newenvironment{rotatepage}
        {%
            \if@twoside%
                \ifthispageodd{\pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}}{%
                \pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 270}}%
            \else%
                \pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}%
            \fi%
        }%
        {\pagebreak[4]\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 0}}%

\makeatother

And then \begin{rotatepage}\begin{sidewaystable} <the content on this page is turned 90°> \end{sidewaystable}\end{rotatepage}

---

Finally, we can combine rotatepage and the environments provided by the rotating package. If we want to turn pages automatically that use sidewaytable, we can hook the rotatepage environment into sidewaytable with etoolbox. In addition to the code above we would need:

\BeforeBeginEnvironment{sidewaystable}{\begin{rotatepage}}
\AfterEndEnvironment{sidewaystable}{\end{rotatepage}}

Of course, similar adjustments could be made for sidewaysfigure etc.

Answer 4

In a comment to Roelof Spijker's answer Martin Scharrer requested the use of the afterpage package to rotate the following pages back again:

\documentclass[twoside]{report}
\usepackage{afterpage}
\begin{document}
text
\makeatletter%
\if@twoside%
  \cleardoublepage%
  \global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}%
  \afterpage{\afterpage{\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 0}}}%
\else%
  \clearpage%
  \global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}%
  \afterpage{\global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 0}}%
\fi%
\makeatother%
text
\newpage
text
\newpage
text
\end{document}

Creating an environment (answer of Jörg) seems to be the better solution imho, thus this answer is just for demonstrative purpose (but might be helpful in another context).