[gs-devel] RE: GS 7.21 and arabic/hebrew fonts

[Raph Levien]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 01:33:26PM -0400, OVERGARD,KEN (HP-USA,ex1) wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running GS thusly:
> 
> 	gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile#out.pdf -dQUIET -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE
> -q input.pdf
>  
> to convert one sort of PDF (that may include nested LZW streams) to
> another (that contains only non-LZW compression filters).
> 
> However, every single time I run this command on a document that uses an
> Arabic or Hebrew font, the output comes out rotated 180 degrees.  The
> rotation is not present in the original document.
> 
> I've deduced that GS is determining that the document should be flipped
> from the text direction, since the only documents that show up this way
> are also written using fonts that are rasterized right-to-left.
> 
> If this is not a bug, is there a way to turn off auto-rotation?

A lot of users see problems with rotation. I doubt it's caused by text
direction, because that's not really a concept in PS files. There's
probably some other transformation matrix or orientation parameter
that's being set at the same time.

Rotation is a FAQ, but unfortunately I don't have an answer from the
top of my head. Jack?

Raph