Landscape and Portrait in the same Document

[sloehr]

I would love to be able to have landscape and portrait pages in the same document. I work with a lot of numerical data, and being able to display table in landscape pages within the same document as the rest of work would be a great help.

[mc7121]

I would love to be able to have landscape and portrait pages in the same document. I work with a lot of numerical data, and being able to display table in landscape pages within the same document as the rest of work would be a great help.

I have absolutely the same requirement. However, I could very well live with a restriction on tables. Ie. it would help me a lot if only a table would offer a landscape or portrait orientation option.

[JWH]

Greetings,
The only discussion I could find on this subject was a year ago in the context of feature requests. Does anyone know if this feature is being worked on; and, does anyone have suggestions for a workaround (perhaps creating a section break in order to begin pagination after the break and incorporate a page or two from another document when photocopying?)?
Thanks,
John

[donb]

There is a way, interestingly enough, though no one has mentioned it before.

Make your landscape item (whether text, table, picture, or whatever, provided it is no longer than one page) with Mellel but as a separate document, and save it as a pdf. Then in your portrait-format-Mellel article or book, make a blank page where you want your landscape item to go. Move the landscape pdf from the Finder onto the blank page in your Mellel document. Mellel will incorporate it while retaining the landscape format for that page.

If your landscape item is more than one page in size, you will need to save each of its pages as a separate pdf, then move the pdfs onto blank Mellel pages in your overall document, since Mellel will not accept more than one pdf at a time -- i.e. it will not take more than the first page of a pdf.

Don Broadribb

[laup]

Don

I can't make it work. I create a landscape graphic in OmniGraffle. I export it to vector pdf. I open a new Mellel file and set page setup to landscape. I insert the image. I can now print to a pd file, which I assume is what you meant. However, when I now move this into a blank page of the main portrait-style Mellel document (or insert image), the insert comes in portrait style--or, rather, it is a landscape graphic that has been shrunk to fit in the portrait-style slot.

I must be missing a step.

This does seem to be a serious shortcoming in Mellel. It should be easy to insert a horizontal graphic. In Word, each section can have its own page setup, which is very convenient. Perhaps I misunderstand.

[DylanMuir]

It seems like these page-setup options (as well as margins) should be pushed into the page styles.

DRM

[donb]

The step you are missing is to open the pdf in Preview, and rotate it 90º. Save this (as pdf). Now it will insert into Mellel correctly.

Don Broadribb

[jennysings]

Now it will insert into Mellel correctly

It will insert into Mellel via these methods, but not correctly. The image is still small, and now there is the problem of 'resizing' it, in addition to the fact that we have double margins (because it is inserted *inside* the new Mellel doc.

[jolinwarren]

The image is still small, and now there is the problem of 'resizing' it, in addition to the fact that we have double margins (because it is inserted *inside* the new Mellel doc.

You could make everything in the original landscape image slightly larger and set the document to have no margins. Then when you move the PDF from this landscape image into your 'normal' Mellel document it should fit a bit better. Still a hack, and it would be good to have proper mixed portrait/landscape support.

[yaxpac]

I thought I would add to this thread which has been silent for awhile. I also ran into this problem and find the hack of inserting the PDF interesting. The problem I am having then is that for this page with a different orientation I am not able to align a caption properly underly the landscape page (so that on the screen the caption will appear parallel to the landscape edge). Using the hack I could hypothetically insert a caption there....but then if the numbering for my images change, I have to remember to manually go recreate that page and re-insert it. I figured one around getting the figure numbers beyond this not to mess up is to insert an "invisible" caption parallel to the portrait orientation.

[drleper]

The PDF hack doesn't seem to be sufficient for serious work. That's a lot of messing about for a page where there may be a very long table (something like a correlation matrix say). Mixing portrait/landscape in the same document would be very cool.