Rotate PDF

Sideways pages usually come from scanners, phone apps and fax machines. A landscape table printed on a portrait sheet, a document fed into the scanner the wrong way, or a phone held at an angle all produce pages that open turned. Reading them means tilting your head or rotating the view every time, and anyone you send the file to has the same problem.

A turned page is more than an annoyance. Upload portals often show a preview of the first page, and a sideways passport scan or certificate looks careless to whoever checks it. Text recognition reads upright lines best, and screen readers follow the stored orientation too. Fixing the rotation once, in the file, saves everyone downstream from fixing it again on their own screen.

The fix depends on how many pages are wrong and whether they are wrong in the same way. The cards below show the three approaches the tool offers.

Apply to decides which pages get the turn. All pages is the simple case: a document scanned entirely the wrong way. Odd pages and Even pages are there for double-sided scans. Many sheet feeders turn the paper over between the front and the back, so every back side comes out upside down; rotating the even pages by 180 degrees fixes the whole stack in one go.

Landscape pages and Portrait pages select pages by shape. They help when a report mixes upright text pages with wide tables or charts that were placed sideways: choose landscape pages and a quarter-turn, and only the wide pages are corrected. Selected pages takes page numbers and ranges separated by commas, such as 2, 5-7, for anything the other choices do not cover.

For the most control, the page picker records a separate angle for each page. Behind the scenes it writes page and angle pairs, and when such a list is present it replaces the angle and the page choice above. The format is shown here so you can recognize it in the settings.

Combining choices covers most real files. A scanned contract where the signature page came out upside down needs only that page at 180 degrees. A thesis with a handful of wide tables needs the landscape pages turned a quarter. A fax with every second page reversed needs the even pages turned. In each case only the pages you selected change, and every other page is copied as it was.

Page numbers in Selected pages are positions in the file, counted from 1 for the first page, which can differ from the numbers printed in the footer. Your PDF viewer shows the position in its page box; use that number so the right page turns.

A PDF page has a rotation setting next to its content. Rotating a page changes that setting rather than redrawing the page, which is why the result is lossless and fast even for long scans. Text stays selectable, links keep pointing to the right place, and the file size hardly changes.

Some PDFs already carry a rotation, often set by the scanner. When you add a turn, it is combined with the existing one: a page stored at 90 degrees and rotated another 90 ends up at 180. If the result is confusing because of such hidden settings, turn on Reset existing rotation. It clears the stored rotation first and then applies your angle, so you know exactly where each page ends up.

Direction matters only for quarter-turns. Clockwise moves the top of the page to the right; counter-clockwise moves it to the left. A half turn, 180 degrees, looks the same either way. When you are unsure, rotate a copy, open it, and adjust; the original on your device is never changed.

Because only a setting changes, rotating is safe to repeat. If you turned the wrong pages, rotate them back the other way, or start again from the original. Bookmarks, form fields and comments are kept, and comments rotate with the page they belong to, so a note stays attached to the paragraph it was written next to.

The rotation also travels well. Because it is part of the standard page description, any PDF reader, browser, phone app or print shop software shows the page the same way, without needing to know which tool turned it.

Rotating is often the first step of a bigger clean-up. Text recognition works best on upright pages, so straighten a scan before converting it with the PDF Converter. If the pages also need trimming down to a few, cut them out with the Split PDF tool, and if you are building one file from several scans, rotate each scan and then combine them with Merge PDF.

When several PDFs are rotated at once, they all get the same settings, and Download as decides whether they come back in a single ZIP or as separate files. Each file keeps its own name, so you can tell them apart after downloading.

Auto upright is the quickest route for a stack of mixed scans, such as receipts photographed at different angles. It looks at the text on each page and turns only the pages that need it. Pages with very little text, such as a photo or a nearly empty form, give it less to go on; check those after rotating and fix any remaining one with a per-page angle.

Rotation turns pages only by quarter-turns. A page that was photographed slightly crooked, a few degrees off, is a different problem known as skew, and it needs correcting in a scanning app or an image editor before the page goes into a PDF. Rotation also does not change the paper size: a portrait A4 page turned by 90 degrees becomes a landscape A4 page. To change the size of the pages themselves, use Resize PDF.

Printers follow the stored rotation too. After rotating, a sideways page prints upright on the sheet, or the printer driver picks landscape for it, depending on its settings. If a print still comes out turned, check the driver's automatic rotation option rather than rotating the file again.