A scanned page came out sideways, or a whole document opens upside down. You turn it the right way in your PDF viewer, close the file, open it again, and it's sideways again. Or worse, it looks fine to you and the person you emailed it to gets the sideways version.
That happens because a lot of rotate buttons only change your view, not the file. To fix it for everyone, the rotation has to be written into the PDF, which is what Rotate PDF does.
Why the rotation didn't stick
Every page in a PDF has a rotation setting: 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees. It's a single number stored with the page that tells any viewer "draw this page turned by this much". The text and images on the page aren't changed at all. The page is just displayed turned.
Viewers have two different features that both look like "rotate":
- Rotating the view turns the page on your screen for now. Adobe Acrobat Reader's View > Rotate View works like this, and nothing is saved into the file.
- Rotating the pages changes the rotation number stored in the file, so every viewer shows the page the new way.
Free viewers often only give you the first one, and the button rarely says which it is. Rotate PDF does the second.
How Rotate PDF changes the file
When you save, Rotate PDF adds your turn to each page's existing rotation value and leaves everything else alone. That has a few useful consequences.
There's no quality loss. The page isn't redrawn or turned into an image, so text stays sharp and selectable, and the file size barely changes. You could rotate the same file a hundred times and it would look exactly the same as after the first.
It adds rather than replaces. If a page was already stored as rotated 90 degrees and you click Right, it ends up at 180. The thumbnails show each page the way it will come out, so what you see is what you get.
It also runs in your browser. The PDF isn't uploaded, which is handy when the sideways page is a passport scan.
Rotating pages step by step
- Open Rotate PDF and add your file. Every page appears as a thumbnail.
- To turn a single page, use the arrows on its thumbnail ("Rotate left" or "Rotate right").
- To turn several at once, pick from the "Rotate" menu: "All pages", "Odd pages", "Even pages" or "Selected pages". Then click "Left", "Right" or "180°".
- Check the thumbnails. Each page you've changed shows its angle in the label, like "3 (90°)".
- Click "Rotate PDF" and download the result. It's saved as yourfile-rotated.pdf.
Left is 90 degrees counter-clockwise and Right is 90 degrees clockwise, which sounds obvious until you're staring at a sideways table trying to work out which way it needs to go. When in doubt, click once and look at the thumbnail.
There are a few ways to pick pages. Click thumbnails to select them, and Shift-click to select everything between two pages. Or type a range like "1-3, 5, 8-" in the box and click "Select" ("8-" means page 8 to the end). The All, Odd, Even, Invert and Clear buttons next to it do what they say. As soon as you select something, the Rotate menu switches to "Selected pages".
Undo and redo work for every rotation, and "Reset all" puts every page back the way it was. If the thumbnails are too small to tell which way up the text is, drag the "Thumbnail size" slider.
The double-sided scan problem
This is the case where the Odd and Even options earn their place. Feed a stack of double-sided pages through a scanner and, depending on how the paper is flipped, every back side can come out upside down. Page 1 is fine, page 2 is upside down, page 3 fine, and so on for 60 pages.
Clicking 30 thumbnails is tedious. Choose "Even pages" in the Rotate menu, click "180°", and they're all fixed in one go. If you scanned the fronts and backs as two separate files, interleave them with Alternate & mix first, then rotate.
When rotating isn't the right fix
Rotate PDF only turns pages in 90-degree steps. A scan that's tilted by 3 degrees because the paper went in crooked needs Deskew PDF instead, which measures the tilt on each page and straightens it.
If you're also reordering pages, deleting a blank one or adding a page from another file, do the lot in Organize pages. It has the same per-page rotate buttons, so there's no need to run two tools. The guide on rearranging and deleting PDF pages covers it.
Password-protected files open in Rotate PDF too. You'll be asked for the password when you add the file, and files that only have editing restrictions open without one. Either way, the rotated copy is saved with no password or restrictions, so run it through Protect PDF if it needs them back.
And if you rotate the same kinds of scans every week, Workflows can chain a rotate step with grayscale, compression and so on, so one run does the whole job.
Send the right file
The most common mistake after all this is attaching the original. The rotated copy is a new file with "-rotated" on the end of the name, sitting in your downloads folder, and the sideways original is still wherever it was. Open the downloaded copy in a different app from the one you used to check (your phone's file viewer is fine) before you send it. If it's the right way up there, it'll be the right way up for whoever gets it.
Also useful: Organize pages · Deskew PDF
