The --landscape option should generate a PS file in landscape orientation

[vinc17fr]

With paps 0.8.0 under Debian/unstable, the command

paps -o paps-landscape.ps --landscape < /dev/null

generates a PS file in portrait orientation: when opening the file, Ghostscript relies only the PostScript code, not on the Landscape information that can be found in the comments generated by paps. See https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=709396#c2

[vinc17fr]

src/paps.cc has

  /* Swap width and height for landscape except for postscript */
  surface_page_width = page_width;
  surface_page_height = page_height;
  if (output_format != FORMAT_POSTSCRIPT && do_landscape)
    {
      surface_page_width = page_height;
      surface_page_height = page_width;
    }

Why "except for postscript"? This may be the cause of the problem...

[dov]

@vinc17fr I'm don't think this correct. For a physical printer, the paper has a physical orientation which doesn't change, no matter whether you print portrait or landscape. Ghostscript behaves in this regard like a printer. But if you are viewing the postscript on a computer screen, with program like evince, then the viewer takes into account the DSC (Document Structured Comments) and rotates the view if needed.

I looked at the ghostscript bug you opened, and I agree this is not ghostscripts fault.

In any case since paps has existed for so long already, and nobody has complained about this before, I'm really hesitant about changing its behavior in this regard. Could you give some background on how this issue is affecting you?

[vinc17fr]

For a physical printer, the paper has a physical orientation which doesn't change, no matter whether you print portrait or landscape. Ghostscript behaves in this regard like a printer.

OK, this seems to be the case when invoking gs with output to the screen. But for conversion to PDF via ps2pdf, this is not how it behaves. For instance,

echo foo | paps -o paps-landscape.ps --landscape

causes ps2pdf to generate a PDF file in landscape orientation when no particular Ghostscript options are added (in particular, without -dAutoRotatePages=/None).

Could you give some background on how this issue is affecting you?

I was using paps --landscape --columns=2, then converting the file to PDF with ps2pdf and $GS_OPTIONS containing -dAutoRotatePages=/None -dPrinted=false from my environment (because this is what should be used when the input is a general PDF file), and the resulting PDF file appeared in portrait orientation.

Note: Since paps now supports direct PDF output (which I discovered after reporting this bug), this may no longer be an issue, except for Debian/stable, which still has paps 0.6.8 without PDF support, but bugs will never be fixed in Debian/stable anyway. But the paps(1) man page still describes paps as "text to PostScript converter using Pango" (ditto for the Debian package description).