Portrait of the Macbook as a river of text

March 26, 2007 1:06 PM

Is it possible to get Macbooks to display in portrait mode?

So, I've been reading a lot of text online recently, and using the rather awesome Tofu to do it. It's a really great tool, but sometimes I really want to flip my Mac on its side and read in big ol' columns of text. It'd also be cool sometimes to browse big long message threads *koff*AskMe*koff* in portrait too.

I've been googling around but am having no joy. Does this exist? Is it ever likely too? Are there any kludges that might do for text realignment?

Cheers MeFites.

posted by Happy Dave to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I was just going to say.. it's in "Display" in System Preferences! But.. I discover it only appears for external displays. How odd! This might mean, however, there's some way to 'hack' that option on for the main display too..

Just for reference, "Rotate" is below the "Gather Windows" button.
posted by wackybrit at 1:34 PM on March 26, 2007

Response by poster: Gather Windows button? What is this you speak of?
posted by Happy Dave at 1:54 PM on March 26, 2007

Oops, rather stupidly I forgot "Gather Windows" also only appears in multi screen setups ;-) If you're curious what it is anyway, more here.
posted by wackybrit at 1:58 PM on March 26, 2007

I just found this rather old trick for enabling Rotate on SOME displays that don't have it by default. This at least demonstrates it may be possible.
posted by wackybrit at 1:59 PM on March 26, 2007

I don't have a "Rotate" below "Gather Windows" - and I've got an external display attached...
posted by aberrant at 1:59 PM on March 26, 2007

The hack for PowerBooks no longer seems to work. I remember using it back in the 10.4.3 days though.
posted by dantekgeek at 3:10 PM on March 26, 2007

Best answer: Not exactly what you want, but on many things I print what I am reading to PDF, then have preview rotate all the pages. Ta-Da, ghetto portrait mode.
posted by shanevsevil at 4:13 PM on March 26, 2007

To follow-up on shanevsevil, OS X lets you print anything to PDF to read with Preview in rotated fashion!
posted by KimG at 4:50 AM on March 27, 2007

Best answer: The program you're looking for is SMSRotateD.
posted by scalefree at 9:06 AM on March 27, 2007

aberrant: Perhaps it's only on certain graphics cards. It appears on both my Intel iMac 24" and PowerBook 17".
posted by wackybrit at 10:28 AM on March 27, 2007