Sadly, I did not figure out why my pdflatex works but yours did not. Yes, pdfpages is a very powerful package, worthy of understand its usages and you did a good job introducing it and gave out a good example. Anyway, what I can think of are 1. check the LaTeX engine: mine is LaTeX2e, version 2011/06/27 (use commands \fmtname and \fmtversion) 2. It is always a good strategy to keep another independent LaTeX in USB (see poster #5398), that should remove the system-related concerns. 3. Remove "landscape" option should give you the portait layout. Can you achieve this? if not, I tend to believe it is a system-related problem, so try point 2 for independent LaTeX. Lastly, good to hear that you find a way solving the problem.