DocViewer: Rotate page/image

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

In the current beta, there is no method for rotating a document. Instructors cannot compensate for students who post PDFs in landscape format (for example). 

Please consider adding a button to rotate 90 degrees (left or right) to better enable instructors to allow alternate rendering and viewing of these documents.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2018-10-06) .

29 Comments
khirschmann1
Community Novice

Sometimes documents that appear in the correct orientation in Acrobat, appear sideways in the preview (at least this was the case in Croc).  A button like this would eliminate any potential problems.

amckale
Community Participant

Definitely the case for some of my students and it was really hard to comment on a rotated assignment.  Workaround was to download, rotate and then post as mine.

khirschmann1
Community Novice

I've also seen instances where one page is in portrait and the rest of the pages are in landscape, which can often result in the first or all of the rest of the pages appearing in the wrong orientation.

Cirrus
Community Participant

This would be a welcome addition!

arolfe
Community Novice

Can this be added to speedgrader as well for files submissions that are images?

r_a_lewis
Community Novice

Very useful, if this added. Downloading a file, rotating it etc etc slows down marking a lot.

leibowit
Community Novice

Ditto.  Students submit Excel files with columns that are off the screen.  Landscape or rotation would likely help me see the entire spreadsheet. 

sms644
Community Novice

This would be a great feature. I see a lot of sideways images submitted because browsers aren't reading the iOS EXIF image orientation data. Students are looking at properly rotated images on their Apple devices, but those images are rotated 90 degrees when viewed in the upload.

cms_hickss
Community Coach
Community Coach

I recently had to open a case about rotated images as we had students who added images of a (paper) form they had to complete to an assignment post. Points were going to be deducted if the orientation was not correct. I worked with one student who took a screenshot from her computer showing that on her computer it was right-side up but that it would turn during posting. I opened a ticket to see if the assignment tool was working as intended when it rotated images 90-degrees. What I was told from support was that:

...that these submissions are being made from iOS. With iOS, when the camera takes a picture, it doesn't add orientation information directly, but through meta-data information after (this is a performance decision by Apple for their camera app). Currently many apps (not all, some previews retain it) will strip that metadata. Our engineers have discussed retaining that meta-data, but there is no information on if or when that will be added. So, "Working as Intended" but subject to change in the future. We are sorry in the meantime for the inconvenience. 

It would be interesting to know what iOS or OS your students were using when they submitted the rotated PDFs.

swolf
Community Participant

Yes please!!