Tables & Figures

How to Rotate a Table or Figure 90 Degrees in LaTeX

Wide tables and figures sometimes need to be rotated 90 degrees to fit the page. LaTeX offers several approaches: the rotating package for individual floats and pdflscape for entire landscape pages. Choosing the right method depends on whether you want the page itself to rotate in the PDF. Bibby AI's preview handles rotated content seamlessly, showing you the exact output as you write.

Rotate a Table with sidewaystable

The rotating package provides sidewaystable and sidewaysfigure environments that rotate the float 90 degrees while keeping the page in portrait mode:

\usepackage{rotating}

% Rotated table — the page stays portrait, but the table is turned 90°
\begin{sidewaystable}
\centering
\caption{Complete Results Across All Configurations}
\label{tab:full-results}
\begin{tabular}{lccccccccc}
\toprule
\textbf{Model} & \textbf{P@1} & \textbf{P@5} & \textbf{P@10} & \textbf{R@1} & \textbf{R@5} & \textbf{R@10} & \textbf{F1} & \textbf{AUC} & \textbf{Time} \\
\midrule
Baseline   & 0.72 & 0.65 & 0.58 & 0.68 & 0.78 & 0.84 & 0.70 & 0.82 & 45s \\
Model A    & 0.81 & 0.74 & 0.69 & 0.77 & 0.86 & 0.91 & 0.79 & 0.89 & 32s \\
Model B    & 0.85 & 0.79 & 0.73 & 0.82 & 0.89 & 0.93 & 0.83 & 0.92 & 28s \\
Proposed   & 0.91 & 0.86 & 0.81 & 0.88 & 0.93 & 0.96 & 0.89 & 0.95 & 21s \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{sidewaystable}

% Similarly for figures:
\begin{sidewaysfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textheight]{wide-diagram.pdf}
\caption{System Architecture Overview}
\end{sidewaysfigure}

Create a Full Landscape Page with pdflscape

If you want the entire page to rotate in the PDF viewer (so readers don't tilt their heads), use pdflscape instead:

\usepackage{pdflscape}

% Everything inside this environment is on a landscape-oriented page
\begin{landscape}
\begin{table}
\centering
\caption{Survey of Related Work}
\label{tab:survey}
\begin{tabular}{llccp{6cm}}
\toprule
\textbf{Reference} & \textbf{Year} & \textbf{Dataset} & \textbf{Metric} & \textbf{Summary} \\
\midrule
Smith et al. & 2022 & ImageNet & Top-1 Acc. & Proposed a novel data augmentation technique. \\
Johnson      & 2023 & COCO     & mAP        & Introduced attention-based detection heads. \\
Lee \& Park  & 2024 & VOC      & IoU        & Combined segmentation with classification. \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{landscape}

Rotate Content by Any Angle with adjustbox

For arbitrary rotation angles (not just 90°), use the adjustbox package or the \rotatebox command from graphicx:

\usepackage{adjustbox}
\usepackage{graphicx}

% Rotate by any angle using rotatebox
\begin{table}[htbp]
\centering
\caption{Rotated Small Table}
\rotatebox{90}{%
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
\toprule
\textbf{Item} & \textbf{Value} & \textbf{Unit} \\
\midrule
Length & 12.5 & cm \\
Width  & 8.3  & cm \\
Height & 4.1  & cm \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
}
\end{table}

% Or use adjustbox for more control
\begin{table}[htbp]
\centering
\caption{Custom Rotated Content}
\begin{adjustbox}{angle=45, center}
\begin{tabular}{cc}
\toprule
X & Y \\
\midrule
1 & 2 \\
3 & 4 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{adjustbox}
\end{table}

💡 Tips

•Use pdflscape instead of lscape — pdflscape also rotates the page in the PDF viewer, making it much more reader-friendly.
•sidewaystable always places content on a new page; it cannot appear inline with text.
•When using sidewaystable, captions and labels work the same way as in regular table environments.
•Bibby AI's preview correctly renders all rotation methods, so you can compare approaches visually before compiling.

Try This in Bibby AI

Write LaTeX faster with AI auto-complete and instant compilation.

Start Writing Free