Determine orientation of PDF

[DSweet]

We have one customer that continually messes us up with the way that they "sometimes" provide their pdf files. When they provide postcard pdf files for us to use as mailing shells in an automated template (web processing that we have programmed to automate the process) there are times that the first page is rotated into a "portrait" orientation while the second page is still in the "landscape" orientation. I know that they do it for readability of the cards when they create them, but it's throwing more than just wrenches into the works when FusionPro sees page 1 as 5.5"x8.5" and assumes that the second page is that way as well. Or worse when they create the cards as page1 - portrait and page2 - landscape and then in Acrobat physically rotate page 1 and resave the pdf file so both pages are landscape in appearance. FusionPro seems to be able to recognize that something has been rotated and rotates it back to the original placement. The customer barks at us stating that the document pages were in the correct orientation and that we did something wrong on our end. So re-printing should be on our dime and not theirs for creating the pdf wrong in the first place.

 

Is there a command, rule, script or any other way of having FusionPro determine which length of a graphic is greater - the height or width? Then be able to use that information to conditionally call the correct graphic box for placement?

 

Also, and I know it's been asked a few times, but is someone able to tell me how either Acrobat or FusionPro is able to determine that a graphic has been rotated and then knows how to restore it back to the original orientation? When I read a rotated pdf file into Acrobat it doesn't care, it's only when I turn that pdf file into a FusionPro document that it beeps and states that items have been rotated and it will now restore it back to the original state.

 

Being able to determine the original orientation and the height and width of a graphic would go a long way to reducing many of the errors we are encountering --- not to mention allowing me to re-grow more of my hair back.

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[Dan Korn]

Yes, this is possible. A search of this forum for "landscape portrait" turns up this:

http://forums.printable.com/showthread.php?p=1367#post1367

 

There's a sample job attached at the end of that thread.

[DSweet]

Thanks for the response Dan, this would work great if all my graphics were 1 page. However, how would I be able to set a pagenumber status to test if a specific page of the pdf file is landscape or portrait oriented? When I tried this on a test pdf file, it read in BOTH pages as being portrait! Page one is portrait, but page 2 is landscape. It seems that my original problem still exists. It appears to me that FusionPro looks at page 1 of a pdf document and assumes that ALL pages are ALWAYS the same size and orientation. Unless there is an extra step in the graphic definition statement that I missed, I'm not sure how to pass the correct pagenumber value.

 

I've attached the alteration to your original template that I did and the output that I recieved. I've also included a test pdf input document that was provided to us by the client in the initial testing phase of this project. Any help you (or anyone else) could give would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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[DSweet]

Posted this a while back Dan. The same issue is cropping up even with the newer version. Any thoughts?

[esmith]

Although it is a manual step, this is (one reason) why we always place client PDFs into InDesign and re-export a PDF for use with FP. Once you place the supplied PDF into InDesign and re-export, the orientation is updated based on the layout file.

[Dan Korn]

Sorry, that particular trick doesn't work with multi-page PDF graphic resources. It has to do with how the typesetting engine reads in the PDF at a very low level, so it's probably not going to change anytime soon.