[tlug] using ps2pdf for PS to PDF conversion in landscape mode?

["Gernot Hassenpflug" <aikishugyo@example.com>]

Hi all,

I have had problems in the past, and these are well-documented on the
web, in using ps2pdf to obtain a PDF file from a landscape-format PS
file (for example, a presentation generated from LaTeX). In the best
case, most of the PDF pages were rotated correctly and only one (or
more) were still in portrait. In other words, not reliable. I am
successfully using Adobe Acrobat Distiller (5.0, so pretty old) on a
Windows 2000 platform to do the conversion from PS properly, which
works with or without the option "rotate all pages in file" set. In
other words, I do not think there is anything wrong with my PS files
per se [for information: generated using dvips with the "-t landscape"
option set], since GhostScript both views and prints it perfectly.

In searching repeatedly for solutions, I have found several proposed
solutions that require defining a new "slide" papersize and telling
the various utilities about it---which I have not tried yet as I am
usually doing work on more than one machine and, well, it has not been
possible time-wise to adapt the various machines completely yet. Other
proposed solutions involve directly editing PS or PDF files. None of
the proposed solutions using only combinations of various options to
ps2pdf worked reliably [see first paragraph], despite the headers in
the PS file being perfectly understandable to Adobe Distiller.

So, I wonder if anyone on this ML knows of a reliable solution to
obtaining landscape-viewable PDF files from similarly-formatted PS
under linux---even if it involves using proprietary software (gasp!).

Regards, Gernot