Expert: Amy - 4/10/2009

Question
I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS2 (12.0.1) on a Mac (OS/X 10.4.11) to edit a  
PDF page (created by someone else) that is rotated 90 degrees. This means
that the visual bottom of the page is on the right side of my monitor, making
it a literal pain in the neck to edit.Is there a way to rotate the way I view the
page, without having to change the page layout from portrait to landscape,
then select and rotate all the objects? In other words, can I change the
orientation I see without having to change the actual document layout? I did
rotate the page in Acrobat and that worked fine. Then I saved it to my
desktop.  But when I open it in Illustrator, it still shows up sideways!

Answer
Hi Cathy.

No, I cannot think of a way to rotate the view without rotating the document.

Some monitors rotate displays but it doesn't help when trying to edit documents.

I have seen this in the forums under feature requests. Maybe it's in the stars.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro (not Reader) you can truly rotate the pages in a PDF, otherwise you are just rotating the display. When you rotate in Reader, you are not affecting the actual data in the PDF that you are saving to your desktop, just the way it is displayed in your copy of Acrobat reader at that particular moment.

I hope this helps. Hope you don't have a lot of these to edit.
-Amy