Portrait VS Landscape for PDF layout

[Urizen]

I'm torn on this subject.

On one hand portrait is great because you only have to make minor changes to a layout in order to make it easy on printers. On the other hand, portrait is kind of crappy to view at the desktop.

Landscape is the opposite. Great for viewing at the desktop, but printing it sucks, so to make a decent printable PDF, you need to go back to protrait anyways.

Any thoughts on this subject?

 

[jgbrowning]

I do landscape for small PDFs (around 4 or 5 pages) cause I expect them to mostly be used on-screen and the printing hassle is minimal.

For anything larger I go portrait.

joe b.

 

[Roudi]

There's a simple solution - do both. A lot of the better PDF-producing RPG companies make screen-ready and printer-friendly versions of their PDFs. In such cases, you'll usually find that they opt for landscape layout for the on-screen version and a portrait layout for the printer-friendly version.

It's more work, but your customers will appreciate you better.

 

[TheLe]

Option 1:
-Landscape version + Portrait version

Option 2:
-Landscape version with images + Portrait version, no images

Option 2 is easiest for most, since many are using a true layout program like Indesign or Quark.

Since I do all my layout in MsWord, creating a landscape & portrait version (both with images) is pretty easy.

If in doubt, only do the portrait version. Customers like to print stuff out.

`Le