[poppler] Comments about a feature request

[Ross Moore]

Hi Albert,

On 29/10/2009, at 7:10 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:

> What do you guys think of
>
> Normalize pages (autorotate landscape pages to portrait)
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24774
>
> I'm not against it, but i don't want our tools to end up having  
> 1500 different
> switches either.

I, for one, am totally against such a mis-feature being made either
default or too easy to select.

PDF is an electronic format; pages do not need to be either the same
size nor the same shape. Even when they are, then working out when
to rotate is a problem that can really only be solved by a person
looking at the page --- unless care has been taken to tag that a page
*should* be viewed at an orientation different to how it was placed
into the PDF.

I've seen examples of pages which a PDF viewer (using auto-rotate)
could not get right. It is very disturbing when preparing slides
for a presentation, and the viewer switches the orientation on you,
due to some kind of heuristics about the content, which are rules
that are either unknown or nearly impossible to work around.

>
> Albert

I've no objection to there being an option which allows a reader
to select auto-rotate for a particular document. But this should
never, ever be the default action.


Hope his helps,

	Ross

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Ross Moore                                       ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                          fax: +61 (0)2 9850 8114
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