Comment 2 for bug 215561

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/csg/faqs/latex.html (last question):

"The landscape document class option doesn't work?

\documentclass[,landscape]{article} is broken. There is an (impressive!) conflict between papersize and landscape in the global documentclass attribute settings which means they argue about textwidth, ultimately resulting in [landscape] being *entirely* ignored!

The right way to do it is:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{landscape}
\def\printlandscape{\special{landscape}}
\special{! TeXDict begin /landplus90{true}store end }
\begin{document}
Content
\end{document}

The \def and \special lines fix landscape rendering in gv so you don't have to flip to seascape -- part of one of my "defs" files by now, since it proves very useful!

xdvi doesn't understand landscape, so don't try and view raw DVI in there.

Also remember to run dvips as 'dvips -t landscape', otherwise you'll just get a portrait A4 page with a landscape \textwidth."