Bug 184742

Summary: Page orientation with dvi
Product: [Applications] okular Reporter: Roland Graf <roland.graf>
Component: DVI backendAssignee: Okular developers <okular-devel>
Status: CONFIRMED ---    
Severity: normal CC: aacid, jmn01
Priority: NOR    
Version: 0.14.4   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: unspecified   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Attachments: DVI file wich is showed in Okular with false page orientation

Description Roland Graf 2009-02-18 01:57:20 UTC
Version:           0.8 (using 4.2.00 (KDE 4.2.0), Gentoo)
Compiler:          x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
OS:                Linux (x86_64) release 2.6.26-gentoo

Hello, when loading a dvi-File in landscape the page of okular is shown in portrait. There is no posibility to change orientation of page or their size.

Best regards

Roland
Comment 1 Pino Toscano 2009-02-18 01:59:03 UTC
Use the View -> Orientation menu?
Could you please provide an example document showing the issue?
Comment 2 Roland Graf 2009-03-15 17:08:54 UTC
Created attachment 32142 [details]
DVI file wich is showed in Okular with false page orientation

Hello Pino,

here is an example that shows the problem with the page orientation. 

Best regards 

Roland
Comment 3 Pino Toscano 2009-03-15 17:35:14 UTC
I can confirm the problem now, thanks for the testcase.
Comment 4 Justin Zobel 2021-03-09 23:59:18 UTC
Thank you for the bug report.

As this report hasn't seen any changes in 5 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists.

If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.
Comment 5 John M. Novak 2022-02-12 01:09:55 UTC
I took a look at reproducing this; as stated, the issue can be reproduced. Using the .dvi file attached to the report, we can see that it renders in Okular in a portrait-mode page, with contents being cut off to the right side of the page. (Checked mostly in  V21.08.1, though I did a quick cross-check in a build of V22.03.70.)

I think this is more of a feature request than a bug; the issue is that as far as I can tell, the DVI format does not store page orientation or size information in its standard form. If you use the tool dvipdf, you get the same result as Okular. You can use dvips -t landscape <file> to get a PS file rendered in landscape; but you must supply the option yourself, it's not embedded in the file. Thus, I don't know that Okular can do any better by default with DVI.

Just for completeness, confirmed that on my machine rotating doesn't help (rotates the page and its contents together), nor does printing (attempting to print landscape for me still printed portrait -- not immediately sure if that's a separate issue or not, or just something related to Linux printing).

We could envision an option in Okular to specify the page size & orientation to use with DVI files, similar to dvips '-t' option (though likely a menu, or somesuch); at this point, I couldn't say what the best approach for that would be.