Include PDF doesn't respect rotation

[alerque]

I have a book with a number of illustrations with small changes between each one. The illustrations are drawn in SVG format and the variations are generated by turning on and off layers. Unfortunately SILE's SVG support is too rudimentary to draw these, so I'm converting them to PDF's using Inkscape before including them in the SILE document.

This works great for most of the variants, but one of them is a full page blow up and I wanted to rotate it 90°. Since the document source is in Markdown and doesn't have an easy syntax to pass that kind of layout data through to SILE, I just specified a source file name that was rotated and generated the correspondent PDF file name with a rotated version (pdftk figure.pdf cat 1west output figure-rotated.pdf). The file shows up fine in most PDF viewers, but when I include it in the SILE document it is back to it's original rotation. The rotation was not respected at all.

[Omikhleia]

Could this be linked to this line in \libtexpdf...

https://github.com/sile-typesetter/libtexpdf/blob/736a5e7530c13582ea704a061a358d0caa774916/pdfdoc.c#L933

The corresponding lines in dvipfmx-x were fixed in 2017, and the commit comments even seem to correspond...
https://tug.org/svn/texlive?view=revision&revision=44963

SILE's libtexpdf derivative might be getting a bit old...

[ctrlcctrlv]

I wonder how hard it would be to apply a patch to the upstream rather than maintain a vendorized version.

[alerque]

That's a good question. Or perhaps a patchset that can be rebased on the upstream and then the difference applied as a patch to our vendor version. I think the point of the vendorized version is that there was/is not an independent library version at all and that is something it still makes sense to have.

I actually haven't looked into how hard it is to refresh our code against the current upstream. The last one to do that operation was @simoncozens. He left some notes on that process in this issue. Perhaps he can throw out a rough estimate of hard that operation is to help decide how to manage it going forward.