PDFsharp & MigraDoc Foundation

I'm writing an application that adds a watermark to PDF pages.

I'm using a test document that has the following pages:
A4 portrait
A3 landscape
A4 landscape
A3 portrait
The pages register correctly once loaded, in that the code objects have the correct sizes and orientation in memory .

However, once saved to a new file, all the pages revert to portrait orientation without affecting the content (i.e. the content is truncated width-wise, and there is a blank section at the bottom of each page).

This behaviour happens even if the pages are not altered in any way.

Steps to replicate the problem:

Create a PDF with any number of pages or sizes, but with at least one landscape page, call it 'testFile.pdf'

Create a new VS C# project, Console application
Add a Reference to the PDFSharp DLL
Add the following code to the void Main:

Code:
PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument PDFDoc = PdfSharp.Pdf.IO.PdfReader.Open("testFile.pdf");
PDFDoc.Save("resultFile.PDF");

Set the working directory and ensure the testFile.pdf is in that directory
Compile and run.

the output file will contain pages of the right size, but all portrait orientation.
This has been tested on a PDF with a single A4 landscape page, and the output was still portrait.

I notice that PdfPage objects are created by default with portrait orientation. I'm not familiar enough with the code base to work out where this would get overriden by the actual size and orientation.

I cannot replicate this problem.

I used the output of the PageSizes sample and ran the Watermarks sample with that - and everything looked fine.
I was using PDFsharp 1.30 GDI+ build.

_________________
Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team

Interesting...I took the results of the PageSizes sample and ran that through the code sample above, and the orientations were fine (i.e. couldn't replicate problem). Also using 1.3 and GDI+ version.

I'm assuming therefore it's some aspect of the PDF's that's causing this?

The original PDF was created with Word 2007 printing to a PDF printer, the original displays fine with the correct orientation in both Acrobat 4 and 8, and the orientation loss appears in both Acrobat 4 and 8.
Edit: same issue occurs with PDF's created from Word 2007 using the SaveAsPDForXPS extension (
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en)...create a document in landscape, save it as PDF, open it in PDFsharp and save it again, and the orientation is portrait.

Any clues as to why this would happen?

Further playing around has revealed a workaround.

Create a new blank document and import the existing pages to the new document, and save the new document...orientations are preserved.

To replicate:

Create a PDF with any number of pages or sizes, but with at least one landscape page, call it 'testFile.pdf'
Create a new VS C# project, Console application
Add a Reference to the PDFSharp DLL
Add the following code to the void Main:

Code:
PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument PDFDoc = PdfSharp.Pdf.IO.PdfReader.Open("testFile.pdf", PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import );
PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument PDFNewDoc = new PdfSharp.Pdf.PdfDocument();
for(int Pg=0;Pg<PDFDoc.Pages.Count;Pg++){
    PDFNewDoc.AddPage(PDFDoc.Pages[Pg]);
}
PDFNewDoc.Save("resultFile.PDF");


Set the working directory and ensure the testFile.pdf is in that directory
Compile and run.

Voila...page orientations are preserved.

Still no idea what's causing it though

GrumpyOldFart,

Your post is a little old but still very valuable. Thanks for posting it. It just saved me hours and hours of trying to track down the same issue.

GrumpyOldFart,

Thanks for posting the solution.
This saved me A LOT OF hours and a big headaches.