10.4: How to rotate OS X's display

May 15, '05 02:17:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintNot sure if this is a hint or not, but I have not seen it mentioned anywhere yet. If you go into the Displays prefrence panel, you will see a new drop down caled "Rotate." This will rotate the image on your display a number of diffrent ways: 90, 180, or 270 degrees.

This is very cool. I'm not sure if this is only with a Cinema display or not; I have the new 20" aluminum display.

[robg adds: This is a very cool feature, especially with some of the larger monitors that are coming out -- a 23" LCD on its side would make a nice monitor for someone who works with large numbers of text-based documents each day (or who wants to view maybe four full-height webpage windows on one screen). You won't see this panel on every Mac -- the 12" PowerBook I own, for instance, doesn't seem to want to let me type sideways. My main machine, though, can have a rotated display, and it works quite well.

Warning: A friend of mine tried the rotation trick on his machine with an older (VGA CRT) monitor connected. Somehow, this resulted in a scan-out-of-range error. After much troubleshooting, neither of us were able to resolve it (you couldn't even boot from the install DVD, and pulling the battery didn't help). He wound up doing an archive and install in FireWire target disk mode to get it back. The big problem seems to be that there's no "Did this change work -- yes or no" dialog box. When you choose a rotation, it just happens. So if your monitor can't take the strange rotated resolution, you may be in trouble...]

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