Text boxes been rotated when pasted into PDF

The page orientation is set from the originating application and even though something can look portrait in Acrobat, it may have been rotated during the PDF creation. This will cause fields copied and pasted into it to be rotated on paste. A workaround I've found for this, on the problem, PDF is to choose File > Save As and choose Format: PostScript (at the bottom of the screen). Then re-distill the .ps file (I typically use the High Quality Print Setting). This will re-set the orientation to the final size of the original PDF.

After doing this you should be able to paste your text into this newly distilled document without it rotating. If the orientation is off, you can use Document > Rotate pages. The good news is, the text should still paste in properly.

Thanks for the suggestion Kelly. However I tried distilling the Postscript file using various settings, including the high quality setting you recommended and unfortunately this hasn't resolved the problem.

It looks to me as if the orientation of the external source file is twisted.

With simple text files, you can manually rearrange them, and open the property dialog and set their orientation correct again. That should get them fixed.

Hope this can help.

Max Wyss.

Thanks for your idea Max Wyss but unfortunately I don't have access to the source files.

I've uploaded a file demonstrating this issue here:

http://www.filesavr.com/D94VFR1R5I5AYYX

It's a quirk with Acrobat, and not easy to get around. Acrobat assumes a page whose width is greater than its height is a "landscape" page, but it rotates the pages on screen according to the "Rotate" tag in the PDF file. In your case, page 2 has Rotate=0 and it is indeed wider than it's tall - so the page you're seeing on screen is the "correct" orientation, Acrobat has not rotated it for display.

However, when copying and pasting annotations from other locations, Acrobat takes note of the dimension ratio, and will apply a 90-deg twist even when it shouldn't. Your text markup box on page two has an internal rotation of 90 degrees. There's no tool in Acrobat to (un)rotate an annotation, you have to draw it again on the destination page. The quirk only affects the copy/paste operation, so drawing a new text box on page two, it will be stored the correct way round.

experiment with the tips i offered in this thread
http://acrobatusers.com/forum/collaboration-commenting/copypaste-text-boxes-and-text-box-rotation

laurencej,

Yes, I tried the distiller trick with your file, and had no luck. The only solution may be to create a new note and copy & paste the contents of the previous note (instead of the note itself).

Thanks for all the suggestions. @ rbogie - I'd already seen your tips and I've tried them as far as I can, I don't have photoshop or MODI, but alas no luck. As Kelly says I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and copy&paste the text in!For any who are interested, here is an PDF example of one which works as you'd like.

http://www.filesavr.com/2T41AVJCTPT66N1

any image editor should serve the purpose. photoshop elements, MS Paint. MODI comes with MS Office.

rbogie,

They may not want to convert the entire PDF to an image.