  Given an initial placement of a set of rectangles in the plane, we consider
the problem of finding a disjoint placement of the rectangles that minimizes
the area of the bounding box and preserves the orthogonal order i.e.\ maintains
the sorted ordering of the rectangle centers along both $x$-axis and $y$-axis
with respect to the initial placement. This problem is known as Layout
Adjustment for Disjoint Rectangles(LADR). It was known that LADR is
$\mathbb{NP}$-hard, but only heuristics were known for it. We show that a
certain decision version of LADR is $\mathbb{APX}$-hard, and give a constant
factor approximation for LADR.
