>This was made much worse when displays migrated from portait by default to landscape by default.
When were displays ever portrait by default? I'm only familiar with resolutions wider than tall. The oldest I've used were the amber/green monochrome CRTs. I honestly don't know the dimensions of those but they were back when 80chars per line (or whatever the count) limits existed. But even then, it always seemed to me to be more chars across than rows down.
Character terminals like the AAA were portrait — 80x48, yes, but characters were taller than wide.
But I was thinking if bitmapped displays since we were talking about PDF: the Alto was the first such, and was bitmapped, as were CADRs, BLIT, PERQ etc…
The early workstations like the Alto, PERQ, and CADR were portrait by default, and used specialized CRTs.
Personal computers tended to use 4:3 displays because they started out with either terminals (which used television CRTs) or by being plugged into literal televisions.
Workstations went to two-page displays a decade and change before even 1024×768 was widespread for personal computers outside ones used as workstations (e.g. very high end PCs and Macs used for CAD, page layout, etc.).
When were displays ever portrait by default? I'm only familiar with resolutions wider than tall. The oldest I've used were the amber/green monochrome CRTs. I honestly don't know the dimensions of those but they were back when 80chars per line (or whatever the count) limits existed. But even then, it always seemed to me to be more chars across than rows down.