Rotate PDF pages the right way up

Your scanner fed the pages in sideways, or somebody photographed a document upside down, and now every reader you open it in shows it the wrong way up. This writes the turn into each page’s own rotation entry rather than spinning the content with a matrix, so the file comes back the size it was, with its text still selectable, searchable and readable aloud. The angle is added to whatever the page already carried, because someone asking for 90° on a page that is already sideways means “turn it again”.

It cannot straighten a page that came in three degrees out. This turns by quarter turns only; deskew is the tool that measures the tilt of the text lines and takes it out.

Rotate the pages

No account. Your upload is deleted after 2 hours, the result after 24 hours.

How it works

  1. Say which pages. Leave it at ‘all’ when the whole document is the wrong way round. Name the pages — 1-3,8, or ‘odd’ — when a scanner fed some sheets in the other way and only those need turning.
  2. Pick the turn. A page lying on its right-hand side needs 90° anticlockwise; on its left, 90° clockwise. Upside down is 180°. If you cannot tell by looking, guess: running it twice more brings the page back where it started.
  3. Check it in a reader. Open the result. Readers honour the page’s own rotation entry, so it now shows upright wherever the file goes — and the words are still words rather than a picture of words.

What the options do

The form above lists the options this tool is running today, straight from the server. This is what they are for.

Pages to rotate
Which pages get the turn. ‘all’ is the common case. Ranges are worth learning when a duplex scanner has produced a file where the backs are upside down: run it once with ‘even’ and 180°, and the whole document reads. You can write 1-3,8 for a mixture, 5- for everything from page five on, and ‘odd’ or ‘even’ for alternating sheets. Pages you do not name are left exactly as they are, and the result tells you how many were turned.
Turn by
Clockwise, anticlockwise, or half a turn — and the angle is added to the page’s existing rotation, not substituted for it. A page already stored at 90° and turned by another 90° ends up at 180°. This matters when you are not sure what a scan already carries: there is no “make everything upright” setting, because nothing in a PDF records which way up the words are meant to sit. Four quarter turns always bring a page back to where it began, so an experiment costs nothing.

What this tool does not do

  • It cannot straighten a page that came in three degrees out. This turns by quarter turns only; deskew is the tool that measures the tilt of the text lines and takes it out.
  • The angle is added to what the page already has rather than set to it, so rotating a document whose pages are already at different angles leaves them at different angles. Turn them a group at a time.
  • Nothing is re-drawn, which is the point — but it means a program that ignores the rotation entry, as a few old print drivers and parsing scripts do, still sees the page the way it was stored.
  • It cannot rotate part of a page, or one image on a page. The turn applies to the whole sheet.
  • It will not work out for itself which way up a page should be. There is no text-orientation detection here; you look at the page and choose.

What happens to your file

The file is uploaded because Rotate PDF runs on our server rather than in the browser tab. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the result you download for 24 hours, then a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

Nothing about the contents is logged, and no one reads your documents. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

I rotated it in my reader but it opened sideways again — why?
Most readers have a View menu rotation that turns the page on screen without changing the file, and it is forgotten when you close the document. This writes the rotation into the page, so every reader and every printer sees it from then on.
Does rotating make the text unselectable?
No. The page keeps its content exactly as it was and only gains an instruction about how to display it, so text stays selectable, searchable and available to a screen reader. Tools that redraw the page as a picture are the ones that lose all of that.
My scan is only slightly crooked. Will this fix it?
No — the smallest turn here is a quarter of a circle. A page that is a few degrees off needs deskew, which finds the angle of the text lines and rotates the page back by exactly that much.
Half my pages are sideways and half are not. What do I do?
Name only the sideways ones. If they alternate, ‘odd’ and ‘even’ do it in one run each; otherwise list them, 2,5,9-12. Everything you do not name is left alone, and the result says how many pages it turned.
Why does my PDF look upright on screen but print sideways?
Something in the print path is ignoring the page’s rotation entry — usually an old driver or a printing script. Rotating here will not help, because that is the very thing being ignored; converting the pages to images and back, or printing from a different application, usually will.