Turn a sheet of paper a quarter turn and it becomes a different kind of picture. Tall, it is a portrait; wide, a landscape. The rotate button beside the sheet’s size makes exactly that turn, and nothing more.
What it does
The button beside the width and height in the PAPER section swaps the two numbers. A sheet 4 inches wide and 5.5 tall becomes 5.5 wide and 4 tall; press it again and it is back. The amount of paper is the same, the colors are the same, and the sheet stays centered where it was.
What does not turn is your drawing. The button changes the sheet, not the shapes on it: every shape stays exactly where it is, and each hole and folded piece is worked out again against the new edges, just as when you type a new size. A cut that sat well inside a tall sheet may now run off the top or bottom of a wide one and become a notch, and a piece that folded out over the top edge now folds from wherever that edge has moved to. If you want the artwork to turn with the paper, select the shapes and turn them with Transform.
Why it works this way
Orientation is usually the first decision in a composition, and the most tedious to make by typing: two fields, two numbers retyped in the other order, and a moment in between when the sheet is square or the wrong size altogether. One button makes it a single, exact move.
It swaps width and height and does nothing else, because that is what turning a blank sheet means. The shapes stay put because the app keeps the size of the sheet apart from what you drew, and rebuilds the paper from the two whenever either changes; changing the size never touches a shape. That has a useful side. With a drawing in place, rotating is a quick experiment: it shows you how the same cuts would sit on paper of the other shape, where the new edges would bite into them, and where their folded pieces would land.
The metaphor
The metaphor is turning a page on its side, or a painter turning a canvas on the easel, or a photographer turning the camera. The words portrait and landscape come straight from painting: portraits are usually taller than wide, to hold a head and shoulders; landscapes wider than tall, to hold a horizon.
Where it breaks: turn a real sheet with a drawing on it and the drawing turns too. Here the drawing stays and the paper turns beneath it. It is closer to holding a stencil still over the table while you swap the sheet under it for one of the other shape. And the words themselves break early. A landscape can be tall, as many Japanese hanging scrolls are, and a portrait can be wide.
A history
In art
The standard canvases sold in nineteenth-century France came in three shapes for every numbered size, and their names said which pictures they were for: figure, the nearest to square; paysage, landscape, narrower; and marine, seascape, the narrowest of all, for the long line of a horizon over water. Each shape shared one dimension with the others at the same number, so choosing a canvas was already choosing how much horizon a picture would have.
Japanese painting built orientation into its formats. A hanging scroll, kakemono, is tall, made to hang in an alcove and be seen whole. A handscroll, emakimono, is long and horizontal, and is unrolled a section at a time from right to left, so that its width is also time: the story arrives as your hands move. Woodblock prints had words for the two ways up: tate-e, a vertical picture, and yoko-e, a horizontal one. Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, from the 1830s, are horizontal, a road seen as a traveler sees it, a band of country. In 1855 he drew the same road again as the Upright Tōkaidō, and from 1856 he made One Hundred Famous Views of Edo in the vertical format, where many designs use the height to set something large and close against something small and far away.
In printing
Printers had their own words: a plate could be printed upright or ‘broad way’, and a book wider than it is tall is still called oblong. But the deepest link between printing and orientation is in folding. A printer prints many pages on one large sheet and folds it. Fold it once and you have a folio, two leaves; twice, a quarto, four leaves; three times, an octavo, eight. Every fold turns the page a quarter turn relative to the sheet it came from. Bibliographers use this to tell formats apart: the faint chain lines left in handmade paper by the wires of its mold run across the page in a folio, up and down in a quarto, and across again in an octavo.
The ISO paper sizes build the same turn into their proportions. Because an A sheet’s sides are in the ratio 1 : √2, cutting or folding it in half gives a sheet of exactly the same shape, turned. Fold a portrait A4 in half and you have a landscape A5. US Letter has no such property: fold it and the half is a different shape.
In technology
Computer screens inherited the television’s wide shape, but one of the most influential early machines did not. The Xerox Alto, built at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, had a display 606 pixels wide and 808 tall, taller than wide, so that it could show a whole Letter page, and the first WYSIWYG editors were written for it. Landscape won anyway. Around 1990 Radius sold the Pivot, a monitor for the Macintosh that could be physically turned between landscape and portrait, the picture turning to match. Phones, with sensors that feel which way is down, made rotation something that happens by itself when you turn your hand. And printer software kept the oldest form of the choice: a page setup with two options, portrait and landscape.
In professional software
Everywhere the setting is called orientation, and the two choices are portrait and landscape. The distinction that transfers is the one this chapter draws: turning the page is a different command from turning the artwork, and most programs keep them apart.
- Adobe Illustrator. Double-click the Artboard tool (Shift-O) to open ‘Artboard Options’, where the orientation buttons swap the artboard’s width and height. The artwork is not turned; to turn it, select it and use the Rotate tool (
R). - Adobe InDesign. Orientation for the whole document is set in ‘File › Document Setup’. The Page tool (Shift-P) can give a single page its own size and orientation, so that one document can mix tall and wide pages.
- Adobe Photoshop. ‘Image › Image Rotation’ turns the whole image, canvas and pixels together, by a quarter turn, a half turn or any angle you type. It is the opposite of Studio Notan’s button, which turns the sheet and leaves the picture where it was.
- Autodesk AutoCAD. Orientation belongs to printing, not to the drawing. The Page Setup and Plot dialogs have a ‘Drawing orientation’ setting, portrait or landscape, and the model itself never turns.
- Silhouette Studio. The Page Setup panel sets the orientation along with the media size. Match it to the way the sheet actually lies on the mat, or the cuts will not land where the paper is.
What carries over. Before you press an orientation button in a new program, ask what it turns: the page, the picture, or only the print. Here it is always the page alone. In Photoshop it is everything, and in AutoCAD only the plot.
Try this
- Make a design on the tall default sheet, rotate it, and look for the cuts that have become notches. Rotate back.
- Draw a shape that reaches off the top edge, then rotate: see where its folded piece goes now.
- Fold a sheet of A4 in half and hold the half against the whole, turned a quarter turn: the proportions match. Try the same with US Letter.
Going further
Read on with Paper and Transform.
- Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography
- Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book