Hello Adobe Team,
We are starting to us Adobe Acrobat Pro (64-bit, version 2025.001.20435) company-wide and generate technical drawings via BricsCAD using the Adobe PDF printer (PC3 driver) with A3 landscape settings.
The issue: Although the drawings are generated in landscape format, and show correctly in print preview, the resulting PDF always opens in portrait view. This happens even though the content is clearly rotated and placed correctly – it's just the page orientation metadata that is missing or wrong.
We confirmed this by:
Comparing PDFs generated via the Adobe PDF printer and other PDF printers (e.g. PDF24, Microsoft Print to PDF)
Inspecting the page objects: the Adobe-generated PDF always has /Rotate 0, even when the page is landscape (e.g. /MediaBox [0 0 842 1191])
Rotating the page manually in Acrobat Pro and saving it does update the /Rotate flag to 270, and then the file opens correctly in any viewer
This causes major problems:
The PDF opens with incorrect orientation in Acrobat, in browser-based viewers, and on mobile devices
We have to manually rotate and save every single file, which is not scalable
Using a different PDF printer is not an option – we standardized on Acrobat Pro to keep the workflow unified
We’ve tested JavaScript rotation scripts inside Acrobat Pro to patch the issue post-export, but this is not a sustainable solution.
Expected behavior: If the drawing layout is landscape, the Adobe PDF driver should correctly set /Rotate 90 or /Rotate 270 for that page in the PDF. Other PDF printers handle this correctly, so we believe this is a bug or missing feature in Adobe’s driver.
Can this be addressed in a future update? Or is there any hidden setting in the PC3 or Windows printer configuration to force orientation metadata?
Thank you – this issue affects all our engineers and creates significant extra work.
Best regards,
Fabian, ace Projects
