[tex-k] dvips and landscape

[Robin Fairbairns]

> For the life of me, I don't understand why dvips can't recognize a 
> landscape file when it has one and then why when you give it the 
> landscape option (dvips -t landscape foo.div) why the offset is so bad. 

how should dvips detect a landscape document?  by printing a page and
thinking "hmm, that doesn't look right, let's try it as landscape"?

there is no way to express information about the application's
presumptions about page dimensions in the dvi spec (and the dvi spec
is immutable, under knuth's requirements).

this is why packages like geometry use a dvips \special to tell it
what shape page the user wants.  the solution to your problem is to
use the geometry package rather than the rather crutty landscape
option in the standard latex classes (or indeed a landscape option in
any other package that doesn't write a \special).

>  This should be a high priority bug fix.

tom's a very obliging person, but he doesn't attempt the impossible.
often.

robin