AT X rotpages.

sty Multiple page rotation in L E Sergio Callegari January 25th, 2002

Abstract
A This L TEX package permits to format documents where small sets of pages are rotated by 180 degrees and rearranged, so that they can be read by turning the printed copy upsidedown. It was primarly meant for collecting exercises and solutions: the package permits to print the exercise text normally and the solution text upside-down in order to make it a bit harder for the students to unintentionally read the solutions before solving the exercises autonomously. Other uses are obviously possible.

Introduction

The package [Link] is meant to be used when parts of a document should be made purposely dicult to read or obfuscated. An obvious way to make something dicult to read is to print it upside-down. This is well known by all those keen on puzzles and cross-words as in puzzle magazines the solutions are often printed the wrong way to prevent the readers from spoiling the pleasure of the quiz by unintentionally reading the solutions. A similar situation emerges in collecting exercises and solutions as an aid for students training. The solutions must be there, so that the students can check their results and avoid getting stuck when they cannot answer some questions. At the same time the solutions should not be easily readable, otherwise the temptation to read them before attempting to solve a problem can be too strong. A typical format for exercise collections consists

in putting all the exercises at the beginning and all the answers at the end. However, this makes people ap pages back and forth all the time. Having the solutions close to the relevant exercises and obfuscating them by page rotation can be an alternative practice. A In L TEX, it is very easy to rotate small amounts of text. The package graphics is a valid aid in this sense. However, it is not easy to deal with large amounts of text. If the rotated material has to span many pages, it cannot be put in a \rotatebox command. Furthermore, if many pages need to be rotated, it is not sucient to ip them individually: they must also be rearranged so that they appear in the proper order when the printed copy of the document is read upside-down. The package [Link] permits to rotate a few pages, rearranging them consisA tently and preserving the normal L TEX algorithm for breaking the material into pages.

Usage

The package denes two basic commands: \rotboxpages and \endrotboxpages, which take no arguments. The command \rotboxpages closes the current page and delimits the beginning of the text which should be typeset upside-down. The command \endrotboxpages marks the end of the region which is typeset upside-down and makes sure that the rotated pages are ushed onto the dvi le. Then it opens a fresh page. The rotated material is by default printed surrounded by a frame (but this can be changed). Page headers and footers con-

tinue display the proper way. When used in two-column mode, the package correctly rotates the columns independently, rearranging them if necessary. The rotated columns get individually framed. Note that the package might not operate correctly with other packages that also alter the paging algorithms. The les in the Examples directory provide some usage examples.

2.1

Personalization

The behaviour of [Link] can be largely personalized. Rotpages can frame the rotated pages, scale them, enhance them with notes (e.g. rotate the book to read this page properly) and so on. All this is done by means of two hooks. The rst hook is set by renewing the command \rotboxAtRotationHook. Whenever A L TEX has nished preparing a page or a column and rotation is activated, [Link] assures that the material is not directly shipped to the dvi le. On the contrary, the material is put into a box and this box is saved onto a stack. When the rotation mode is terminated, all the boxes saved onto the stack are shipped to the dvi le in inverse order. The stack mechanism is obviously necessary because the pages need to be rearranged while ipped upside down. The \rotboxAtRotationHook is invoked on the pages/columns just before saving them onto the stack (i.e. right after rotation). Hence the \rotboxAtRotationHook takes a box as its argument and should return a box. In the simplest case the \rotboxAtRotationHook command can just return its argument. In more complex scenarios it can put a frame around it and so on. The second hook is set by renewing the command \rotboxAtShippingHook. The idea is the same as for the \rotboxAtRotationHook, however this hook is invoked when taking the pages o the stack rather than while putting them onto the stack. In most cases the two hooks can be used 2

indierently. However there is a very subtle dierence among the two. When putting the pages onto the stack one can easily keep trace of the relative number of the page among the lot that is being rotated, but cannot know the actual page number as this will be determined only at shipping time. On the contrary, when taking the pages out of the stack one can know the actual page number, because the shipping is eectively taking place. This differenc can be used to add numbering labels and rotated/non-rotated text to the pages being rotated as one of the les in the Examples directory shows. In any case, consider that [Link] has no problems in dealing with labels and page-references and does so in the expected way, i.e. using the actual page numbers. The default for the two hooks \rotboxAtShippingHook and \rotboxAtRotationHook is the following: the \rotboxAtRotationHook frames the page, and the \rotboxAtShippingHook does nothing. The package [Link] also denes a couple of lengths: \rotboxheight and \rotboxwidth. These are related to the size of the rotated pages/columns. It is the user responsibility to assure that the rotated pages are exactly as large as the normal ones. However, if a page is framed, one must take into account that the frame occupies space. If this fact were not considered, the rotated pages would come out with smaller characters than the normal ones. In fact, the text plus the frame should occupy as much space as a normal page. The solution to overcome this problem is to put slightly less text on the pages which get rotated, i.e. to format the text for a virtual page which is smaller than the normal ones, accounting for the frame. The lengths \rotboxheight and \rotboxwidth have exactly this purpose, setting the size of the virtual pages on which the text to be rotated gets formatted. The default for \rotboxheight and \rotboxwidth is the size of a normal page, less the space occupied by the default frame.

To conclude, the [Link] package denes a boolean variable which can be used to test whether the current text is being rotated or not. This is the variable \boolean{rotboxactive} which can be tested using the \ifthenelse command.

Known bugs and quirks

The package is unable to deal with oat material. Avoid oat material in the rotated pages. Equations, quotations, displayed math and other non-oat material can safely be used. Apart from this, the package is relatively young and no bugs are known so far. It should be observed that the .dvi les produced with [Link] cannot be viewed properly with xdvi, kdvi and most dvi previewers. However, this is not a problem of [Link], rather of xdvi which does not understand correctly some of the \specials produced by the graphics package which is internally invoked by rotpages for the page rotation. The postscript les produced by dvips display and print correctly. The packA age is also compatible with pdfL TEX. In order to re-arrange the pages which are rotated, the shipping of the formatted material to the dvi le needs to be deferred until all the rotated pages are processed. This puts a limit on the number of pages which can be rotated at once, since the deferring mechanisms A uses a stack which eats up the L TEX memory.

\@makecol macro is temporarily modied, so that the formatted pages get processed by the \rotboxAtRotationHook command, rotated and accumulated into a stack. At the \endrotboxpages command, the beA haviour of L TEX gets reset to the standard. After that, the pages that had been accumulated onto the rotpages stack are processed by the \rotboxAtShippingHook command, scaled to a normal page size and ushed to the dvi le. The stack mechanism assures that the pages get to the dvi le in the correct (rearranged) order. For the page rotation, [Link] relies on the standard graphics package and so does for scaling.

To-do
Allow the package to pass options to the underlying graphics package, particularly concerning the drivers (dvips, xdvi, etc.) to use. Make the package deal correctly with oat material (maybe hard to do). Check the compatibility of the package with other packages.

Internal operation

The package works by redening the \@makecol macro, which is normally used by A L TEX to format and ship a page to the dvi le. Particularly, at the \rotboxpages command, the \@opcol and the \@startcolumn macros are temporarily disabled, so that no page gets shipped to the dvi le and no page number can be updated. Also the current page size is altered, following the \rotboxheight and \rotboxwidth lengths. Furthermore, the 3