Android - Can I manually rotate my phone while auto-rotation is disabled?
I use Quick Settings and there's an option to toggle auto-rotate. I have it so the shortcut to Quick Settings lives in my Notification bar so to toggle it requires a swipe, two taps and the back button to toggle it and get back to the app I was in.
If you wanted to reduce this down to tap home, toggle, tap return
if you use QuickDesk which lets you put widgets on it's popup launcher.
I'm sure you could probably set it up as a sortcut in Gesture Launcher but I never had any luck with that app. All it does is force close for me.
Edit: Sorry, misread you question. I don't know of any app that does that and I looked around but came up empty. Personally, that would actually be the ideal behavior of the screen orientation and while I'd have no idea how to make it, it can't be that hard. I'd recommend asking around at the XDA forum. Hopefully someone there may know or maybe one of the devs there will make an app to do it.
I don't know any way to do it by system tools. However, I know couple of apps, which will let you complete this task. You need root access. Here is what I have: Ultimate Rotation Control and GMD GestureControl Lite. GestureControl lets you tight almost anything to any gesture. And URC has an ability to share switches of orientations of screen as "Actions". So you're going to GMD and make new gesture and tie it to "Action" — any desired orientation from URC.
P.S. You need root to use GMD because, AFAIK Android has no another way to set system-wide gestures.
Since you've said toggling auto is fine, you can just use the quick settings pull-down in Jelly Bean and later. Hold the phone in the orientation you want, then pull down the settings tray, and turn auto-rotate back on. When it's rotated, turn it off again right away.
You can even use it on phones that don't have the stock settings tray, if they have a replacement. Samsung phones are an example of this: instead of two trays, they have one notification panel with "quick access settings" at the top. You can configure which settings are shown, and auto rotate is one of the options.