Bug 220967

Summary: Inconsistent handling of /Orientation
Product: Ghostscript Reporter: Alex Cherepanov <alex>
Component: PS InterpreterAssignee: Ray Johnston <ray.johnston>
Status: NOTIFIED LATER    
Severity: normal CC: jackie.rosen
Priority: P2    
Version: master   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Customer: Word Size: ---

Description Alex Cherepanov 2000-10-31 19:22:03 UTC
Originally reported by: alexcher@users.sourceforge.net
PLRM says "The dictionary returned by currentpagedevice always contains an entry for every parameter supported by
the device". GS 5.50, 6.12, 6.30, 6.60 print both messages in the following program:

%!
currentpagedevice /Orientation known not
  { (This printer does _not_ support Orientation.) =
  }
if
<</Orientation 1>> setpagedevice
currentpagedevice /Orientation known
  { (Err... wait... it does.) =
  }
if
%%EOF
Comment 1 L. Peter Deutsch 2000-12-31 11:08:46 UTC
Comment originally by lpd@users.sourceforge.net
The handling of Orientation is a mess. The PLRM says quite explicitly that it is only supported for roll devices, where the page size alone doesn't give enough information to decide whether to rotate the page.

The reason that Ghostscript accepts it for other devices at all is twofold: displays are like roll media in that they don't have an inherent orientation, and almost none of the other Ghostscript devices actually specify their page sizes. Both of these reasons are now poorly motivated: displays should behave like portrait-orientation devices (albeit with variable page dimensions), rotating the image if the requested page width is greater than the height, and now that setpagedevice and the Resource machinery are fully implemented, all printer drivers should be updated to provide the paper size information. Once these fixes are made (which will probably have some repercussions other places in the code), Ghostscript will handle Orientation properly.
Comment 2 Ray Johnston 2001-04-02 16:10:42 UTC
Comment originally by rayjj@users.sourceforge.net
Logged In: YES 
user_id=11206

We acknowledge that this is a valid issue, but we do not have
resources available to address this at this time.

This problem report has been moved to doc/Issues.htm where it
may remain open for some time. Relevant comments are
captured there along with the ID# of this report.

By moving this issue to the widely distributed Ghostscript
documentation, we wish to make this issue well known and
solicit help in improving Ghostscript in this area.

Thanks for your input!