rotate page in libra office

English Applications
1

Hi all,

I’m running Libra Office 3.4.2 under OpenSuse 11.4 and have a question about rotating a page in Writer.

I am self-publishing a book and the printer requires the docs in a PDF format – one for each component: coverpage, spine, transcript. I have the spine document produced as a normal portrait document with dimensions of 9.46 width and 0.51 height.

The publisher is asking that I rotate this BEFORE exporting it as a PDF. And I can’t figure out a way to do this. I can’t just redo the page as landscape because then I can’t get the width dimension down to 0.51. It looks like it has a minimum width of about 1.5". But I can’t find a rotate page function either.

So is there a way to do this? Create a page in normal portrait mode and then rotate it clockwise 90 degrees?

2

This is not possible unless the element is an image; indeed, if you look up ‘rotate’ in the LibreOffice Help, it tells you that you can only rotate text within a drawing object. So place your text in a drawing object in Draw and then rotate it before creating the PDF.

3

Don’t know if this helps you: if you open a PDF in Okular, you can View - Orientation - Rotate left. If I do that, save a copy and then open the copy, it still has a rotated page…Please let know it this works for you. If not, there should be PDF editors that can do what you want.

4

Thanks for the ideas. I don’t have okular installed but I did figure out a way to work around the problem. When I switched the page orientation to landscape, I mentioned that the smallest I could make the width was about 1.5" and I needed 0.51". This was because the page margins were set to 1 inch. When I reduced the margins to 0, then I could set the page to the needed dimensions of height=9.61 and width=0.51. So basically I had to recreate the spine PDF from scratch.

The “Rotate Page” feature would be a useful feature to add to a future release.

5

This feature is available in LaTeX which IMHO is a far better program for self-publishing. If you find LaTeX intimidating, install the LyX frontend and read the excellent Help documentation which will tell you how to do everything you need.