hopefully final version:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 %%BoundingBox: 0 0 842 595 %%HiResBoundingBox: 0.0000000 0.0000000 842.00000 595.00000 -90 rotate -842.0 595.0 translate 0.8 -0.8 scale . . .
Yes this finally worked.
sed command: sed -e 's/^0.0 595.00000 translate/-90 rotate\n-842.0 595.0 translate/'
Oh and for A3 paper replace every 842 by 1191 and every 595 by 842. For letter size 595->612, 842->792. For tabloid size 595->792, 842->1224
I'm still looking for a "real" solution. But even with a newer cups version (1.22) as recommended in that SDB doc at http://portal.suse.de/sdb/de/2002/12/jsmeix_print-cups-landscape-81.html it didn't work. So I decided to write a more flexible script to do the rotation to portrait: $ cat psrotate2portrait #!/usr/bin/awk -f BEGIN { rotate = 0 } { done = 0 } /BoundingBox/ { if ($4 > $5) { rotate = 1 printf("%s %s %s %s %s\n", $1, $2, $3, $5, $4) xt = $4 yt = $5 done = 1 } } /translate/ { if (rotate > 0) { printf("-90 rotate\n-%s %s translate\n", xt, yt) done = 1; } } done == 0 { print } $ It derives the translation parameters from the BoundingBox parameters, and if the orientation is already portrait, it does not rotate. Thanks Dierk for your hints to the ps syntax. As the above scripts is also just a workaround, does anyone else also have this problem? Is this specific to inkscape? Does this program create buggy ps code? According to the SDB doc the ps code should contain an Orientation command, but the ps file created by inkscape does not... Mario