PDF Rotator

How to use the PDF Rotator

1. Drop in the PDF with the wrongly oriented pages.
2. Enter all, or list the pages that need turning — for example 2, 5-8.
3. Choose the angle and press Rotate pages, then download the corrected file.

Why rotating in a viewer does not stick

Most PDF readers let you rotate the view, but that is a display setting held in the application. Close the file, send it to a colleague, or print it, and the pages are sideways again.

PDF stores orientation as a page attribute — a /Rotate value of 0, 90, 180 or 270. This tool changes that attribute and saves the file, so every viewer, printer and preview thumbnail shows the corrected orientation. That is the difference between rotating the view and rotating the document.

Rotation is free

Changing the rotation attribute does not touch the page content at all. Nothing is re-rendered, no image is re-compressed, and text stays selectable. The file size is essentially unchanged, and you can rotate as many times as you like with no cumulative loss.

Rotations also accumulate on top of what is already there. If a page is already at 90° and you rotate it 90° more, it ends at 180° — the tool reads the current value and adds to it rather than replacing it.

Mixed orientations in scanned documents

Batch scanners frequently produce documents where some pages are portrait and others landscape, particularly when a stack contains the occasional wide table or a sheet fed in the wrong way.

The "only rotate landscape pages" option handles this in one pass: it compares each page's width and height and skips anything already portrait. That saves working out which page numbers need attention in a long document.

Frequently asked questions