UK TeX FAQ -- question 141

### 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.
- 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). This defines 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 would 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.

A word of warning: most current TeX previewers do not honour rotation requests in `.dvi` files (the exceptions are the (commercial) Y&Y previewer dviwindo, and the fpTeX previewer WinDVI). If your previewer is not capable of rotation, 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/supported/geometry.tar.gz
`graphics.sty`
  Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/graphics.tar.gz
`longtable.sty`
  Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/tools.tar.gz
`lscape.sty`
  Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/graphics.tar.gz
`pdflscape.sty`
  Distributed with Heiko Oberdiek's packages macros/latex/contrib/supported/oberdiek.tar.gz
`rotating.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/supported/rotating.tar.gz
`supertabular.sty`
  macros/latex/contrib/supported/supertabular.tar.gz