[texhax] Landscape orientation with plain TeX

[Ian.Collier at comlab.ox.ac.uk]

Rodolfo Medina wrote in texhax:
>Thanks to all who replied.
>
>I achieved my purpose the following way.
>At the beginning of the file I said:
>
>	\input graphicx
>
>, where graphicx.tex is a file featured in the package graphics.tar.gz
>available at the ctan address 'macros/plain/graphics'.
>Then I said (I don't know if it's very well done, however it seems to work):
>
>\def\landscapeoutput{\shipout\hbox{\rotatebox{90}{\pagebody}}
>                 \advancepageno\ifnum\outputpenalty>-20000
>\else\dosupereject \fi
[snip rest]

In my opinion this was entirely unnecessary.  As Reinhard Kotucha
pointed out, all you have to do is tell TeX the dimensions of the
paper (e.g., 297x210mm instead of 210x297mm) and leave the rotation and
other peculiarities of printing it out to the tools which were designed
for that task.  In particular, dvips allows you to say "-t landscape" to
rotate each page through 90 degrees (and will do this automatically if
you include \special{landscape} in the TeX source).
-- 
---- Ian Collier : imc at comlab.ox.ac.uk : WWW page below
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