Tiger and flat panel screen rotation...
Submitted by batondor on May 9, 2005 - 11:11pm.
Development & Software Hacks
What follows is the reconstruction of an exchange that began about ten days ago after I visited an Apple Store in our area to test "Tiger"... I am in the market for a new laptop, but one of the criteria I am applying this time around is to be able to read documents in portrait format... I do not necessarily want to go the TabletPC route; in fact, I am an old UNIX hand and would prefer to make my first purchase from Apple now that the foundation is more familiar to me...
So I tested and discovered that there is a rotation option on the Display Preferences panel of a PowerMac G5 and the MacMini... but NOT on Powerbooks, iBooks, or the iMac G5... Finding this strange, I asked the staff and discovered that they did not even know this option existed. I checked the documentation on the Apple site and was not helped. I then checked aroundgood on the web and could find nothing conclusive...
...so I finally joined Applefritter (I have been checking out MacOS-oriented sites for a few months and appreciate the form and content offered here), but rather than start with a blog or forum topic, I queried Tom Owad... who kindly shared some ideas but ultimately suggested that I submit the question to one and all... So here goes (by the way, I seem to have lost my first email to Tom, so you will have to do with where he responded the first time... though I think I basically said what is said above...)
PS for Tom: I am not adept at forums, so I hope this will help us both to find an answer...
Edward
Hi Edward,
I'm very interested in hearing more. I have a 20" Dell that supports swivel hooked up to my 12" Powerbook, so I'm very interested in this! Where is the screen setting, on the desktop machines?
Here's a very interesting pic:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/03/more_photos_of.html
Tom
According to this thread, it's driver independent:
http://forum.macbidouille.com/index.php?s=27e3c61e571356ef282544c65b54f635&showtopic=115746&pid=1084306&st=0&#entry1084306
Tom
Hi Tom,
I just checked out the MacBidouille site and really could not figure out what is going on... and I read French fluently, so that was not a problem. I checked the specs on the Samsung SyncMaster 213 T and it has a DVI-D interface that I am guessing can inform the driver that the screen has a physical dimension of 1200x1600 (portrait) instead of 1600x1200 (landscape).
My experience/experiment at the Apple Store at Chestnut Hill was simpler: I brought up the Display Preferences panel on each machine: on the PM G5 and MacMini there was an "orientation" option with a dropdown menu holding "standard", "90", "180", and 270"... When I tried this on the Powerbook and iBook without an external monitor, no such option was present... And when I tried it on a Powerbook with an Apple monitor attached (to the DVI interface, I think) and neither screen showed an option to modify the orientation...
I will be curious to hear whether it works with your Dell when you rotate it and then power it up...
Ciao,
Edward
On May 6, 2005, Edward wrote:
Hi again,
I have not been able to make any further concrete progress on understanding the options for setting screen orientation (as in rotation) with MacOS 10.4 (Tiger) with built-in displays such as notebooks and the iMacs. As time has allowed, I have taken the following actions...
- a broad look at the web via Google and various MacOS-oriented websites, with limited success and really only new questions...
* the MacBidouille example seems to be encouraging, but I will bet it was hardware enabled with the screen in portrait mode presenting a fixed but rotated form-factor via the VESA-based EDID...
* I saw one article that vaguely said an early public beta of Tiger allowed screen rotation but that Quartz Extreme was not enabled... which is obviously unacceptable...
* another thread (that I cannot now find) implied that the preferences for orientation could be set at Tiger install time but that they were impossible to change again... not very practical...
* and another had an ambiguous reference to a keystroke command that will either invert the video (WB-to-BW) or actually rotate the screen... and perhaps with a chance of return to the original state, so it is not for the fainthearted...
- a second trip to a local Apple Store, this time in Cambridge near MIT (hoping for a more 'connected' staff since it was the first Apple Store in the area). No help, though, other than discouragement...
- and then I got home to look one last time before querying you... and I found this link to SpyMac
...and since I found the forum babble rather distracting, I will save you the trouble of searching for the keystrokes because I am still confused by the two options proposed:
1. Open "System Preference", then restart it, open it again, then hold down ALT and click the 'display' icon.
2. To do this press the option key when you click "displays" in the System Preferences application
I presume that one of these, or both, will work on a Powerbook or iBook with MacOS 10.4, but I do not yet own any Apple hardware and will need to make another trip to test... Please let me know if you decide to jump in and give it a try on one of your platforms... or if you have made any further progress towards discovering what-is-what...
Best regards,
Edward
The option-key trick didn't work for me. I do have a report from one user though that rotation works on his TiBook.
Want to post your findings on Af Forums, so we can get opinions from others?
Tom