Rotate PDF

Sideways pages are one of the most common PDF annoyances. A phone scan of a landscape form comes out on its side, a scanner feeds one sheet the wrong way round, a bank statement mixes portrait pages with a landscape summary, or a document merged from several files has a few pages upside down. Turning the page in a PDF reader only changes your view and is forgotten when the file is closed, so the person you send it to sees it sideways again. Portals for university admissions, visas, tax and job applications also show the pages exactly as saved, which makes a sideways certificate hard to read for whoever checks it.

This page saves the turn into the file. Every PDF page has a Rotate setting, defined in the PDF standard as a multiple of 90 degrees, that tells every reader how to show it. PDFRotate changes that setting for the pages you choose and writes a new PDF. Because only the setting changes, the page content is not redrawn or recompressed: text stays selectable and searchable, images keep their full quality, and links, bookmarks, form fields and comments are kept. The file size stays almost the same.

Pages that already carry a rotation are handled correctly. If a page was saved turned 90° and you turn it 90° more, it ends at 180°, and the preview shows exactly how each page will look before you save. Choosing Landscape pages is a quick way to straighten a long report where only the wide tables were saved sideways, and Odd or Even pages fixes a double-sided scan where every back page came out upside down.

Speed matters on a page you use for ten seconds. The PDF engine (pdf-lib) is about 200 KB compressed and loads in the background while the page is idle, then runs in a worker so the page never freezes. A typical 10-page scan is ready in well under a second, and a 500-page file is turned and saved in a few seconds, with progress shown as it works. Previews are drawn small and only for pages you scroll to, so even very long files stay quick on a phone.

The PDF stays on your device. It is read, turned and saved by code running in this tab, and the new file is handed straight to your browser as a download. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and no watermark, which matters for ID cards, bank statements, contracts and medical reports.

A digital signature stops verifying after any change to a signed PDF, rotation included, so keep the signed original if the signature matters. Password-protected PDFs need the password removed first with Unlock PDF. Rotation turns whole pages only; it does not straighten a scan that is slightly crooked.