How to rotate pages
- Add the PDF. Thumbnails of every page appear.
- Use ↺ and ↻ under any page to turn it 90° left or right; the thumbnail turns so you can see the result.
- Use Rotate all left or Rotate all right for the whole document.
- Click Save rotated PDF and download.
What actually changes
Every PDF page has a rotation setting, in steps of 90°, that tells viewers how to display it. This tool changes that setting and saves the document. Nothing is redrawn, so text stays selectable, images keep their quality and the file size barely changes. Because the setting is stored in the file, the page opens the right way in every viewer, on every device, and when printed.
This is different from the rotate button in a PDF viewer, which usually turns the view for this session only. If you have rotated a document in your viewer and it reopens sideways, that is why.
Why scans come out sideways
Scanners and phone scanning apps guess orientation from the paper's position or the camera's sensor. A landscape page fed portrait-first, a phone held sideways, or a mix of portrait and landscape pages in one batch all produce sideways pages. Some apps auto-rotate based on detected text and get mixed pages wrong. Fixing it before you send the file saves the recipient turning their screen, and some portals reject documents that are not upright.
Rotating as part of a bigger tidy-up
- Need to delete blank pages from the same scan? Delete pages uses the same thumbnails.
- Pages in the wrong order as well? Reorder pages lets you drag them, and keeps rotations you saved.
- Combining scans from several files? Merge can rotate a whole file as it combines.
Landscape pages in a portrait document
A spreadsheet or diagram printed landscape inside a portrait report is normal. Leave it landscape; viewers show it correctly and printers turn it. Rotate only pages that are actually the wrong way up or sideways relative to their content. If a reader will view the document on a phone, upright pages matter more, because rotating a phone to read one page is awkward.
Tips
- Rotate before you sign, redact or add page numbers, so positions line up with what you see.
- If thumbnails take a moment to appear on long documents, they render one page at a time to keep the page responsive; you can start rotating as soon as a page shows.
- Rotation does not fix a skewed scan, one that is a few degrees off. Rescan with the page straight, or use your scanner app's straighten option.
Rotating is lossless, quick, and free for files up to 50 MB.
On a phone or tablet
Rotation works well on a phone because the thumbnails are large enough to tap. Choose the PDF, tap the rotate buttons under any sideways page, then save. Rotating a phone-scanned document before you upload it is worth doing: an assessor reading on a desktop screen will see it the right way up.
Mixed orientation and printing
When a document mixes portrait and landscape pages, printers rotate landscape pages to fit the paper automatically, so you should not rotate them just to print. Rotate only pages whose content is sideways relative to the page, which is the case for most scanning mistakes. Once saved, the file opens correctly everywhere, including on the recipient's phone.
Avoiding sideways scans in the first place
- In phone scanning apps, turn off auto-rotate if it guesses wrongly on forms with little text, and rotate manually before saving.
- Feed landscape pages into a sheet-fed scanner the same way every time, and check the first page before scanning a stack.
- When photographing documents, hold the phone in the same orientation as the page.
Rotation and file size
Because rotation only changes a setting on each page, the saved file is almost exactly the same size as the original. If you also need it smaller, run Compress PDF afterwards; compression keeps your rotation.
Does rotation affect signatures or forms?
Changing a page's rotation setting does not alter its content, so signatures, stamps and filled form fields on the page are preserved and simply displayed the other way round. If a document carries a cryptographic digital signature, any change to the file, including rotation, will show the signature as invalid in viewers that check it; rotate before signing, not after.
Privacy: the file stays on your device
Online PDF services upload your document to their servers, process it there and keep it for a while. This tool does the work in your browser. The file is read into the page's memory, processed by open-source libraries (pdf-lib for editing and pdf.js for rendering) in a background worker, and the result is offered back as a download. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account, and closing the tab discards everything. You can check it: open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab while you run the tool, and you will see no upload. After the page has loaded once it also works offline.