Rotate whole document in Illustrator

[angelam54321]

How do I rotate a whole document (I guess you'd say artboard?) in Illustrator. The building map layout document that was created in Illustrator needs to be viewed upside down and I need to rotate the whole document 90 degrees. I know how easily to do this in Photoshop, but not Illustrator.  Thank you!

[Jacob Bugge · Accepted solution]

Angela,

Some 12 or 15 years ago there was a joke in the Windows forum (before the Mac/Windows merge in 2009) about rotating the monitor.

A maybe silly question, but 90 degrees only lays the document on the side rather than upside down, is it 180 degrees?

And another one, what about the text?

How about creating a nostroke/nofill rectangle the size of the Artboard (you may ClickDrag it with the Rectangle Tool (Smart Guides are your friends saying when you are within snapping doistance of opposite corners, then select everything and rotate as desired? You can rotate back again if desired.

[angelam54321]

Baha! I meant 180 degrees, lol!

I did a workaround in case I can't rotate the whole document and placed all of the text I added upside down so that when it's printed it'll be correct - however for viewing...not sure still. I'll try your suggestion and see if that works. Had hoped there was a clear-cut answer that I was unaware of. I'm not as knowledgeable in Illustrator as I am Photoshop. Thanks!

[angelam54321]

Yay!!  That worked. Thank you very much!

[Jacob Bugge]

You are welcome, Angela.

An auxiliary nostroke/nofill object, like the the Artboard fitting rectangle or a rotation symmetrical object such as a circle or a square with just the right centre and extending past the outermost parts of the artwork in question, can be very helpful in a number of cases, it may be convenient to group it with the artwork.

[Luke Jennings]

I wanted to mention one thing, I believe effects applied to objects will "remember" the original orientation of the object, so as the object is rotated, the effect is not. The work-around is to create a new file, place the original file as a link, and rotate the link.

Also, for the rare occasion you need to view type in one orientation and print in the opposite orientation, you can create separate layers and include the layers in your saved PDF, then in Acrobat, set the layer properties to view but not print and print but not view, respectively.