[Tex/LaTex] rotating vs lscape vs pdflscape

lscapepdflscaperotating

I'm asking this looking for the ultimate answer. What are the main differences between the three of them? When should I use anyone in particular?

I know there is this question: Should I prefer {pdflscape} over [pdftex]{lscape}?, but it doesn't address the issue with the rotating package.

Also, there is this question: Rotating text by -90 degrees , but once gain: no reference about the rotating package.

Furthermore, I'm trying to get a figure (packages: graphicx, float, subcaption), and later on a Gantt diagram (packages: tikz, pgfgantt) on landscape layout.

Which one of the three should I use? What are the advantages of one over the other? (I have already gone through this question: Rotate Gantt Chart Figure, but the only answer is with lscape).

UPDATE: I ran some tests and it seems that when using a longtable environment pdflscape modifies all the pages along the table, whereas [pdftex]{lscape} only modifies the last one.

Code:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{pdflscape}
%\usepackage[pdftex]{lscape}  % Uncomment if you want to see the output with [pdftex]{lscape}

\begin{landscape}
\begin{longtable}{l p{0.8\linewidth}}

WEFAPS          & \hspace{5mm} Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\
WHO                 &   \hspace{5mm} World Health Organization\\
GDP                 & \hspace{5mm} Gross Domestic Product\\
PPP                 & \hspace{5mm} Purchasing Power Parities\\
MEMs                &   \hspace{5mm} Micro-Electromechanics\\
BDN                 & \hspace{5mm} Bayesian Dynamic Networks\\
ADL                 & \hspace{5mm} Activities of Daily Life\\
STST                &   \hspace{5mm} Sit-To-Stand Test\\
PPA                 &   \hspace{5mm} Physiological Profile Assessment\\
TUGT                &   \hspace{5mm} Timed Up-and-Go Test\\
DFRAC               & \hspace{5mm} Demura's Fall Risk Assessment Chart\\
STRATIFY        & \hspace{5mm} Saint Thomas's Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients\\
USUST               & \hspace{5mm} Unstructured and Unsupervised Test\\
WEFAPS          & \hspace{5mm} Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\
WHO                 &   \hspace{5mm} World Health Organization\\
GDP                 & \hspace{5mm} Gross Domestic Product\\
PPP                 & \hspace{5mm} Purchasing Power Parities\\
MEMs                &   \hspace{5mm} Micro-Electromechanics\\
BDN                 & \hspace{5mm} Bayesian Dynamic Networks\\
ADL                 & \hspace{5mm} Activities of Daily Life\\
STST                &   \hspace{5mm} Sit-To-Stand Test\\
PPA                 &   \hspace{5mm} Physiological Profile Assessment\\
TUGT                &   \hspace{5mm} Timed Up-and-Go Test\\
DFRAC               & \hspace{5mm} Demura's Fall Risk Assessment Chart\\
STRATIFY        & \hspace{5mm} Saint Thomas's Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients\\
USUST               & \hspace{5mm} Unstructured and Unsupervised Test\\
WEFAPS          & \hspace{5mm} Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\
WHO                 &   \hspace{5mm} World Health Organization\\
GDP                 & \hspace{5mm} Gross Domestic Product\\
PPP                 & \hspace{5mm} Purchasing Power Parities\\
MEMs                &   \hspace{5mm} Micro-Electromechanics\\
BDN                 & \hspace{5mm} Bayesian Dynamic Networks\\
ADL                 & \hspace{5mm} Activities of Daily Life\\
STST                &   \hspace{5mm} Sit-To-Stand Test\\
PPA                 &   \hspace{5mm} Physiological Profile Assessment\\
TUGT                &   \hspace{5mm} Timed Up-and-Go Test\\
DFRAC               & \hspace{5mm} Demura's Fall Risk Assessment Chart\\
STRATIFY        & \hspace{5mm} Saint Thomas's Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients\\
USUST               & \hspace{5mm} Unstructured and Unsupervised Test\\
WEFAPS          & \hspace{5mm} Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\
WHO                 &   \hspace{5mm} World Health Organization\\
GDP                 & \hspace{5mm} Gross Domestic Product\\
PPP                 & \hspace{5mm} Purchasing Power Parities\\
MEMs                &   \hspace{5mm} Micro-Electromechanics\\
BDN                 & \hspace{5mm} Bayesian Dynamic Networks\\
ADL                 & \hspace{5mm} Activities of Daily Life\\
STST                &   \hspace{5mm} Sit-To-Stand Test\\
PPA                 &   \hspace{5mm} Physiological Profile Assessment\\
TUGT                &   \hspace{5mm} Timed Up-and-Go Test\\
DFRAC               & \hspace{5mm} Demura's Fall Risk Assessment Chart\\
STRATIFY        & \hspace{5mm} Saint Thomas's Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients\\
USUST               & \hspace{5mm} Unstructured and Unsupervised Test\\
WEFAPS          & \hspace{5mm} Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\
WHO                 &   \hspace{5mm} World Health Organization\\
GDP                 & \hspace{5mm} Gross Domestic Product\\
PPP                 & \hspace{5mm} Purchasing Power Parities\\
MEMs                &   \hspace{5mm} Micro-Electromechanics\\
BDN                 & \hspace{5mm} Bayesian Dynamic Networks\\
ADL                 & \hspace{5mm} Activities of Daily Life\\
STST                &   \hspace{5mm} Sit-To-Stand Test\\
PPA                 &   \hspace{5mm} Physiological Profile Assessment\\
TUGT                &   \hspace{5mm} Timed Up-and-Go Test\\
DFRAC               & \hspace{5mm} Demura's Fall Risk Assessment Chart\\
STRATIFY        & \hspace{5mm} Saint Thomas's Risk Assessment Tool in Falling Elderly Inpatients\\
USUST               & \hspace{5mm} Unstructured and Unsupervised Test\\


\end{longtable}
\end{landscape}
\end{document}

Best Answer

lscape and pdflscape is the same, the first for using latex the second for pdflatex. If your image needs more or less the total \textheigth as width then use the landscape environment, defined by these packages. If the image is much more smaller and doesn't need the whole page then use \rotatebox or the environment turn or \hvfloat from the package of the same name if you also need a caption and, of course, no page break.

You do not need all those \hspace:

%\usepackage{pdflscape}
\usepackage{lscape} 
[ ... ]
\begin{landscape}
\begin{longtable}{l @{\hspace{5mm}} p{0.8\linewidth}}

WEFAPS          &  Wearable Fall Assessment \& Prediction System\\

and viewing the pdf output with lscape is identical to the one with pdflscape

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Should I prefer {pdflscape} over [pdftex]{lscape}

Answering the various points "why does lscape package recommend a different package" well it doesn't really. The ctan catalog package descriptions are not (in general) by the package authors but a third party review of the package.

There are three places that "rotation" can occur when considering a page in a pdf file. lscape only considers one of them [* see note at end about [pdftex] option] and pdflscape considers two.

To make a page landscape you need to:

first switch round \textheight and \textwidth (and a few other associated lengths). That much you can do in pure TeX.
Then you need to rotate the text box on to the page (since lscape doesn't move the page numbers) This is done by using \rotatebox from the graphics package and so needs driver dependent code specified by a package option or defaulted from graphics.cfg.
For printing, that's all you need, but for viewing you might want to rotate the "entire page" the other way so that on-screen the main text is vertical and the effect is that the page outline is rotated to landscape. pdflscape inserts additional code to rotate the view in the viewer.
But ... some pdf viewers use heuristics to determine the orientation of the "main" text on a page and rotate the page view even when not explicitly specified.

As far as I know you can't reliably rotate the page view in ways that work for all configurations of all viewers. If as in the original lscape you ignore the issue the page will look fine if using a viewer that auto-rotates and the page has sufficient text that it can tell which way is up (It's harder to tell which is up for images). If you force the view to rotate as in pdflscape then (I think) if the viewer auto-rotates the it gets rotated twice so ends up the wrong way up. It would be nice to be able to say "this way up" but I don't think that's possible (and it isn't what either package does) you can only say "rotate the view" from a default that might change depending on the viewer.

At least I think that's the situation, I never actually used pdflscape but I had a quick look at its code while writing this:-)

Ah. As noted above I checked the code for the "other" package but didn't check the code of "my" package. ...

So apparently back in 1999 I accepted a 3rd party diff so that lscape also affects the pdf page view attributes if used with [pdftex] . Sorry the version in my head was the original:

% \changes{v3.01}{1999/06/22}{Added better pdfTeX support
%    by Scott Pakin, from graphics/3063}
%
%
%    \begin{macrocode}
%<*package>
%    \end{macrocode}
%  Here is what Scott Pakin wrote about the pdftex option:
% \begin{quote}
%    I've made a minor improvement to lscape.dtx that I'd like to share 
% with the world.  My addition makes lscape rotate the PDF "paper" --
% not just the text on the page -- when given the "pdftex" option.
% (Naturally, this works only with pdfLaTeX.)  The result is that the
% text is viewable online without the reader having to rotate his/her
% head 90 degrees.  The document still prints normally.
% \end{quote}

  \ifGin@pdftex
    \pdfpageattr{/Rotate 90}
  \fi

So I think that there effectively isn't any difference for pdftex but pdflscape adds equivalent code for many other driver back ends such as dvips or dvipdfm. Sorry about the confusion.

This also explains why you need to use [pdftex] explicitly lscape handles that itself to add the code shown above. It would probably be better if instead it just let graphics handle the options and then make an internal check to see which driver backend graphics ended up using. That way it would also work if the graphics driver were defaulted from graphics.cfg (as is usually the case with graphics package options).

[Tex/LaTex] What causes rotation of landscape page while lscape in use

In correspondence with Andreas Matthias was pointed out:

Pdfpages is loading pdflscape.sty internally. And pdflscape rotates all landscape pages.

As a quick workaround, please add the following after loading pdfpages. This disables pdflscape to rotate the pages.

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\PLS@Rotate[1]{}
\makeatother

Now the behaviour is as expected.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Should I prefer {pdflscape} over [pdftex]{lscape}

[Tex/LaTex] What causes rotation of landscape page while lscape in use

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