_How do I rotate the view in Ai?

@ : hilltopapts1

— Your advice does not make sense in practice for me. That's what you're saying relates to the transformation of objects, and that I think everyone can do that?

This really isn't the same thing; if you're going to actually modify the file, why not just rotate everything natively in Illustrator?

The beauty of how InDesign and Photoshop rotate the view is that they are not modifying the file, only the display. This is a long-needed feature in Illustrator as well, and I'm disappointed that it didn't make it into AICC. 

Personally I wouldn't go that far... from a prepress perspective Unembed Image is going to be a huge timesaver (as would rotating the canvas), two features that have been in InDesign for quite a while now.

It's one of the reasons I don't care for a stylus/tablet. It introduces a cumbersome tablet just to change the shape of the pointing device to that of a pencil.

That introduces the problem of the tablet's rotational orientation not being sensed through the pointing device, as it is through the shape of a regular mouse. So the grid of the tablet provides that orientation. That's not really sensed as you draw with the stylus while looking at the monitor. The angle of your movements is dependent upon the orientation of the tablet relative to the screen, rather than the movement of the pointing device relative to the screen.

Put that fuctionally back in the context of a mouse: You've just made it necessary to "correctly" rotate your desk under your computer, just to achieve something you consider a "more natural" arm movement.

With either scheme, you've decided to become married to your precious stylus. And you find yourself dissatisfied, and requesting that every software publisher add a feature that tries to treat the real-world horizontal/vertical orientation of the monitor pixels as if they are rotated when they're not.

Consider a wireless stylus which requires no tablet and is round, with no button or or other feature to determine its rotation. That's essentially a "pencil" equivalent to what turned out to be the most horribly-designed pointing device ever conceived: the origninal round mouse of the early G4 Macs. In other words, it's just a pencil-shaped mouse that works on any surface.

Now put a button on the side of the stylus like that on a Wacom stylus. If your index finger is on that button, you have a tactile rotational sense of which direction is up on your monitor; which is what the orientation of the tablet provides now.

You can use this stylus on any surface. That surface can be any shape, size, or orientation, just as your desk can be when using an ordinary mouse. If you want to hold that surface in your lap, just pick up a clipboard. But would that satisfy? No, because the monitor is still real-world horizontal when your particular "natural feeling" "sideways" movement is not.

So a software vendor complies, and develops who-knows-how-convoluted software routines to make the screen image act as if it's rotated to correspond to your particular "natural feeling" angle. You claim to be so happy because now you make what feels like a "natural" horizontal forearm movment, and it draws "horizontally" across the rotated display of the virtual page edge displayed in the program.

But move your forearm in your "natural feeling" upward direction to go select a menu command. The menu bars, the frame around the view of your software has not rotated to your "natural" angle. So how come users who sing the praise of this feature, and curse programs which don't provide it, don't at the same time complain loudly that the menus haven't rotated? (Could it be that they have found it necessary to make concession to the real world?)

Now....

Those of you married to tablets: Mount your LCD monitor on a back-side pivot and physically rotate the whole monitor. Suddenly, not only is the page display visually rotatable to your "natural" angle, but its menus rotate accordingly too. "Up" is "naturally up" whether you're drawing a cartoon blob stroke or selecting a menu command. Isn't that more representative of what you are trying achieve by demanding a fake "rotation" feature in every graphics program? Isn't that the real way to make your computer mimic the angle at which you are holding that tablet in your lap? Isn't that the functional and visual equivalent to rotating the "paper" on which you are scribbling with your "pencil"? And, egads, it works in every program you've got! With zero performance hit! It's just not as "cool" as having some artsy-tartsy make-me-feel-special feature built into the software.

Once again, the emperor has no clothes.

JET

Being able to rotate the artboard can be useful in many situations. The most obvious is probably package design.

Imagine you've got a sophisticated layer structure with loads of locked and unlocked layers and/or objects, for example, and you want to visually examine the package at different angles on the fly (without having to go to Acrobat or another programme as a workaround and without having to release the locked objects).

The same may apply to certain map designs as well as to board game design, circuit diagrams, plant layouts etc.

The vector drawing programme Creaturehouse Expression (nowadays a Microsoft application) has had the ability to rotate the artboard from the beginning.

Reillet wrote: It would be a very useful feature to have though, especially for freehand brushstrokes. Is this something we can expect in a future release? Reillet

Absolutely, I made an argument for this a while back in a feature request I will try again but with tools like the new eraser tool and blob brush and draw inside and bristle brushes this becomes more important as well perhaps some new types of tools to create hand drawn art.

You can rotate the view in InDesign too... definitely a feature I'd love to see in AI as well.