I did some reading recently on design for manufacture (in particular,
https://rheingoldheavy.com/design-assembly-kicad/), and one of the things that came up was that you should have your component footprints oriented the same way as they’re loaded into the tape that gets loaded into the pick-and-place machine. Many KiCad footprints (including those that ship with KiCad) aren’t oriented this way, and even in the new KiCad 5, I don’t see an easy way to rotate an entire footprint. You can rotate a footprint inside a PCB design, but unless I’m missing something, there’s no option within the footprint editor to take all the elements within and rotate them (let alone an option to rotate an individual element, as far as I can see).
I’ve come up with this:
https://gitlab.com/salfter/kicad-footprint-rotator/It's a sed script that takes a KiCad footprint and rotates it 90° counterclockwise by transforming coordinates, dimensions, and rotation angles within. If you need to rotate 180°, run your footprint through the script twice. To rotate 90° clockwise, run it through three times.
Some screenshots of a footprint that has been processed through the script are up on my blog:
https://alfter.us/wp/2018/08/15/how-to-rotate-kicad-footprints/