Rotate Publisher Document (and all content): NOT Rotate VIEW

[Transglobalist]

Hello Everyone!

I am nearing completion of a photo zine to be printed in trade book format. The layout is 5 x 8 (plus bleed), but the book is designed to be viewed 8 * 5. Spine-on-top. You can see the first page and first few spreads below to see what I mean.

So now that I'm nearly finished, I discovered the need to rotate my entire layout to the left, along with all the content (and bleeds, and margins). Code-wise this should be a very simple procedure, but I can't figure out how to do it. I DO know how to rotate the view; I'm talking about a permanent rotation that can be exported for printing (in this case, for first printing, it will be uploaded to blurb.com).

I know how to change the global document dimensions, which works fine for the pages, but the content is unaffected. Every master page would have to be manually adjusted, which I can do, no matter how tedious, but.... This is the first in a multi-zine series, each of which will have this spine-on-top presentation. Creating/editing 40-50 page documents & layouts in rotated VIEW is counterintuitive and inefficient. At least it seems so to me.

Many thanks in advance for any and all advice and suggestions! Even if there's an easy way to rotate the output print-PDFs, it would be preferable to this post-layout tedium and/or to working at all times with a rotated view. 

Have a great day,
---jim

 

[NotMyFault]

Seems to be not officially supported.

If you use studio link and switch to Photo Persona, you can rotate the pages. Use at own risk.

[Transglobalist]

12 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Seems to be not officially supported.

If you use studio link and switch to Photo Persona, you can rotate the pages. Use at own risk.

Thanks for the response, but...

When I switch to Photo persona, I don't have access to page objects as far as I can see. Maybe I'm missing something. Also (as you hint at with "use at your own risk") it seems like exporting everything as images solely to rotate them is error prone and not so sustainable.

When you say "seems to be..." is that from trying it yourself, or from a source I haven't found yet? I'm still searching.

Also: it just seems like a weird oversight if it isn't supported. I mean, it's the same sort of requirement as scaling--which is easy to do. For instance, I'm currently living in Ecuador and need to resize the same document to A5 for a local print run. Easy peasy! Mathematically, rotating the document + content is a much easier task for the code than scaling is.

Anyway...any semi-standard workaround would be great.

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

When I switch to Photo persona, I don't have access to page objects as far as I can see.

In the Photo Persona, you start out on whatever Page/Spread you were on in the Publisher Persona. You can navigate to a different page using the page navigator on the left of the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen.

I have no idea how or whether rotating the "document" from the Photo Persona would work.

57 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

I know how to change the global document dimensions, which works fine for the pages, but the content is unaffected. Every master page would have to be manually adjusted, which I can do, no matter how tedious, but.... This is the first in a multi-zine series, each of which will have this spine-on-top presentation. Creating/editing 40-50 page documents & layouts in rotated VIEW is counterintuitive and inefficient. At least it seems so to me.

Perhaps using Smart Master Pages would help with that. You could design everything as you have currently done, then apply a different set of rotated Master Pages that would acquire all the content from the original Master Page layers. You just need to make sure that you name all the objects on the original Master Pages, and use the same names for the objects on the new Master Pages.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/Pages/migrateMasterPages.html

[thomaso]

56 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

if there's an easy way to rotate the output print-PDFs

PDF pages / spreads can easily get rotated individually or all together in Acrobat Pro (don't know about Reader) and in macOS in the Preview.app.

[ Actually I don't understand your sample page 1, respectively the reason for to deliver a rotated PDF to blurb, I would assume their print process has the option for rotation? In my impression a change from 5*8 to 8*5 would not be done with a page + content rotation (but page only, which can be done by changing the page dimensions) and would require a layout adjustment to the new page orientation. ]

[Transglobalist]

1 minute ago, thomaso said:

PDF pages / spreads can easily get rotated individually or all together in Acrobat Pro (don't know about Reader) and in macOS in the Preview.app.

[ Actually I don't understand your sample page 1, respectively the reason for to deliver a rotated PDF to blurb, I would assume their print process has the option for rotation? In my impression a change from 5*8 to 8*5 would not be done with a page + content rotation (but page only, which can be done by changing the page dimensions) and would require a layout adjustment to the new page orientation. ]

I don't have access to Acrobat Pro, but am downloading Reader to see if I can rotate it there. Adobe also has an online tool to rotate PDFs, though I haven't tried it yet (upload sizes are often an issue for me--I live on a bicycle, traveling the world). PDF rotation would certainly be the ideal solution--allowing me to work on my layouts in the intended orientation.

Regarding Blurb, I just sent a support request to see if they can do it on their end, as you suggest. But the whole reason I started down this path today is I tried uploading my current draft using their PDF to Book tool, and it rejected my files on grounds of "unsupported dimensions." Or something like that. (My page dimensions are exactly those required for their Trade Book format, only rotated.)

In any case, thank you, for taking time to reply. We'll see how it goes!

[Transglobalist]

11 minutes ago, thomaso said:

PDF pages / spreads can easily get rotated individually or all together in Acrobat Pro (don't know about Reader) and in macOS in the Preview.app.

[ Actually I don't understand your sample page 1, respectively the reason for to deliver a rotated PDF to blurb, I would assume their print process has the option for rotation? In my impression a change from 5*8 to 8*5 would not be done with a page + content rotation (but page only, which can be done by changing the page dimensions) and would require a layout adjustment to the new page orientation. ]

Quick update: Can't rotate with Adobe Viewer. You have to do a paid option, minimum $12/month (I live on about $650/month out here on my bike, and have to save my software budget for Lightroom/Photoshop, which I use almost every day).

[thomaso]

5 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

rejected my files on grounds of "unsupported dimensions."

A few forum posts mentioned such a rejection reason for KPD and it came out that any tiny element in the layout touched their bleed too far, which made the software complain.

So, to check if the reason for blurb is indeed the page orientation you could upload a blank test PDF first, maybe one in 5x8, another in 8x5. (… to possibly avoid the need of rotation).

Or, another workaround: Export the layout as you have it –> then create a new APub document as required –> and place / rotate that exported PDF as required. When using a master page with an image frame and paste the PDF inside this frame you can rotate all together by rotating just the 1 master object. The cumbersome part will be to choose the right PDF page on every new document page. (I vaguely have in mind that APub V2 is some more comfortable when placing sources.)

[loukash]

22 minutes ago, thomaso said:

another workaround: Export the layout as you have it –> then create a new APub document as required –> and place / rotate that exported PDF as required.

You don't even have to export the original layout. Just save it as is, then place the rotated *.afpub master page on the new layout master page, then edit detached and select the matching spread from your original layout:

[loukash]

4 minutes ago, loukash said:

place the rotated *.afpub master page on the new layout master page, then edit detached and select the matching spread from your original layout

In fact, just placing directly on spreads and duplicating per cmd-drag will be faster.

[Transglobalist]

6 hours ago, loukash said:

In fact, just placing directly on spreads and duplicating per cmd-drag will be faster.

Thanks so much for all your help. My hope was that simply rotating the export PDF would do the trick, and that is what worked in the end. Or seems to be working. I got past Blurb.com's preflight check, uploaded the rotated PDFs, and created a draft book. There are still some bugs to work out, but Blurb's tech support folks have been pretty responsive.

If anyone is interested, I used PDFCandy.com's online tool. It was recommended on numerous sites, and though it has some limitations in the free version it was quick and easy to use. It did the trick nicely.

---jim