Typesetting things in landscape orientation
It’s often necessary to typeset part of a document in landscape
orientation; to achieve this, one needs not only to change the page
dimensions, but also to instruct the output device to print the
strange page differently.
There are two “ordinary” mechanisms for doing two slight variations
of landscape typesetting:
- If you have a single floating object that is wider than it is
deep, and will only fit on the page in landscape orientation, use
the rotating package; this defines
sidewaysfigure
and sidewaystable
environments which create floats that occupy a whole page.
Note that rotating has problems in a document that also
loads the float package, which recommended in other
answers in these FAQs, for example that on
float placement. The rotfloat package
loads rotating for you, and smooths the interaction with
float.
- If you have a long sequence of things that need to be typeset in
landscape (perhaps a code listing, a wide
tabbing
environment, or a huge table typeset using longtable or
supertabular), use the lscape package (or
pdflscape if you’re generating PDF output, whether
using PDFLaTeX or dvips and generating PDF from
that). Both packages define an environment landscape
, which
clears the current page and restarts typesetting in landscape
orientation (and clears the page at the end of the environment
before returning to portrait orientation).
No currently available package makes direct provision for typesetting
in both portrait and landscape orientation on the same page (it’s not
the sort of thing that TeX is well set-up to do). If such
behaviour was an absolute necessity, one might use the techniques
described in
"flowing text around figures", and would
rotate the landscape portion using the rotation facilities of the
graphics package. (Returning from landscape to portrait
orientation would be somewhat easier: the portrait part of the page
would be a bottom float at the end of the landscape section, with its
content rotated.)
To set an entire document in landscape orientation, one might use
lscape around the whole document. A better option is the
landscape
option of the geometry package; if you
also give it dvips
or pdftex
option,
geometry also emits the rotation instructions to cause the
output to be properly oriented. The memoir class has the same
facilities, in this respect, as does geometry.
A word of warning: most current TeX previewers do not honour
rotation requests in DVI files.
Your best bet is to convert your output to PostScript or to PDF, and
to view these ‘final’ forms with an appropriate viewer.
- geometry.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/geometry (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- graphics.sty
- Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/graphics (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- longtable.sty
- Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/tools (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- lscape.sty
- Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/graphics (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- memoir.cls
- macros/latex/contrib/memoir (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- pdflscape.sty
- Distributed with Heiko Oberdiek’s packages
macros/latex/contrib/oberdiek (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- rotating.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/rotating (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- rotfloat.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/rotfloat (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
- supertabular.sty
- macros/latex/contrib/supertabular (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=landscape