How to rotate pages in a PDF
Straighten sideways pages without touching quality.
A page fed sideways through a scanner, a landscape chart in a portrait report, a photographed document that arrived on its side: all the same problem, and all fixed by rotating the page rather than tilting your head.
The steps
- Upload the PDF.
- Choose 90, 180 or 270 degrees.
- Select which pages to rotate, or leave it blank for all of them.
- Run the tool and download the corrected document.
Rotation is lossless
Rotating sets an attribute on the page. Nothing is re-rendered and nothing is re-compressed, so the content is bit-for-bit identical afterwards. There is no quality cost, and no reason to avoid doing it more than once.
Different pages, different angles
A single run applies one angle. If some pages need a quarter turn and others need a half, run the tool twice, selecting the relevant pages each time and carrying the result forward into the second run.
Which way is 270?
Three quarter-turns clockwise, which lands in the same place as one quarter-turn anticlockwise. If a page is lying on its left side, 90 is usually what you want; on its right side, 270.
If you cannot picture it, rotate once and look at the preview. Because rotation is lossless and its own undo, guessing wrong costs nothing: rotate by 180 to flip it the rest of the way, or run the tool again with a different angle.
Rotation versus a rotated scan
This tool turns pages in ninety-degree steps, which fixes a page that went through the feeder sideways. It does not straighten a page that is merely askew — a scan sitting at three degrees off true needs deskewing, which is a different operation and not one offered here.
