Rotate PDF

Rotate PDF lets you turn pages the right way up in your browser. Load a PDF and every page appears as a thumbnail: click a page to turn it 90 degrees clockwise, use the arrows to turn it either way, rotate the whole document in one click, or type a page range such as 2, 4-6 or even to rotate just those pages. When it looks right, save a new PDF. Rotation is stored as a page setting rather than by re-drawing the page, so text stays selectable and images keep their quality, and the file never leaves your device.

How to use the Rotate PDF

1. 1 Open your PDFDrop a PDF onto the tool or click to choose one. Each page is drawn as a thumbnail on your own device, so you can see which ones are sideways or upside down.
2. 2 Rotate single pagesClick a thumbnail to turn that page 90 degrees clockwise, or use the arrow buttons underneath to turn it anticlockwise. Pages you change are highlighted.
3. 3 Rotate several pages at onceUse the all pages buttons to turn every page, or type a range such as 1-3, 8 or the words odd or even, choose an angle and press Apply.
4. 4 Check the resultThe counter shows how many pages will be rotated. Press Reset if you want to start again from the original orientation.
5. 5 Save the rotated PDFPress Save rotated PDF and download the new file. Your original PDF is left untouched.

Why PDF pages end up sideways

Sideways pages are one of the most common annoyances with PDFs, and they nearly always come from the way a document was made rather than from anything you did. Office scanners feed paper in one direction, so a landscape spreadsheet or a booklet page that went in the wrong way round comes out rotated. Phone scanning apps guess the orientation from the camera and sometimes guess wrong. Documents assembled from several sources, such as a contract with a landscape schedule bolted on, often mix portrait and landscape pages without anyone fixing them.

The page itself is usually fine. It is simply displayed at the wrong angle, which makes it awkward to read on screen, irritating to review in a meeting, and easy to print the wrong way. Rotating the page fixes the display permanently, so everyone who opens the file afterwards sees it the right way up.

How rotation works inside a PDF

Every page in a PDF can carry a rotation value of 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees. PDF readers apply that value when they show or print the page. Rotate PDF changes this value and nothing else. It does not redraw, rasterise or recompress anything, which is why the result is as sharp as the original, text can still be searched and copied, links keep working, and the file size barely changes.

This also means rotation is reversible. If you rotate a page by mistake, you can load the saved file again and turn it back, with no loss at all. Some free tools achieve the same visual effect by converting each page into an image and rotating the picture, which makes text unsearchable and often blurs fine print. That approach is unnecessary for a simple rotation.

• 90 degrees clockwise turns a page that is lying on its left side upright.
• 90 degrees anticlockwise, which is the same as 270 degrees clockwise, fixes a page lying on its right side.
• 180 degrees turns an upside-down page the right way up.
• Rotating four times by 90 degrees brings a page back to where it started.

Rotating all pages, single pages or a selection

Most jobs fall into one of three patterns, and the tool has a control for each. If the whole document came out of the scanner sideways, use the all pages buttons to turn every page in one go. If only one or two pages are wrong, such as a landscape table in the middle of a portrait report, click those thumbnails until they look right.

The selected pages box is for anything in between. Type page numbers and ranges separated by commas, for example 3, 7-9, 12, choose the angle and press Apply. You can also type odd or even. That is particularly useful for double-sided scans, where a scanner or app sometimes flips every back page upside down: type even, choose 180 degrees, and every reverse side is fixed at once.

Rotations add up, so applying 90 degrees to a page that is already turned 90 degrees leaves it at 180. The small label under each thumbnail always shows the total rotation that will be saved.

Rotate a PDF without uploading it

The documents people need to rotate are often scans of letters, contracts, payslips, medical forms, passports and other identity documents. Uploading those to an unknown website just to turn a page round is a poor trade. Rotate PDF opens the file, draws the thumbnails and writes the new PDF entirely inside your browser, using JavaScript running on your own device. Nothing is sent to our servers and there is no account, watermark or limit on the number of files.

Because everything runs locally, the speed depends on your device. Drawing thumbnails for a 300-page document takes longer on an older phone than on a laptop, but the saving step is quick on any device because it only changes a setting on each page.

Rotation, page size and printing

Rotating a page by 90 or 270 degrees swaps how its width and height are presented, so a portrait A4 page becomes a landscape A4 page on screen. The page size itself does not change, so nothing is cropped or stretched. When you print, most PDF readers detect the orientation of each page and turn it to fit the paper automatically, though it is worth checking the auto-rotate or fit to page option in the print dialogue if a page comes out small.

If your document mixes portrait and landscape pages on purpose, such as a report with wide tables, it is usually better to leave the landscape pages landscape and rotate only the ones that are genuinely upside down or sideways. Readers on tablets and phones then see each page at its natural size.

When rotating is not the right fix

Rotation turns a whole page in steps of 90 degrees. It cannot straighten a scan that is slightly skewed, for example a page that went through the feeder a few degrees off. Fixing that needs a deskew feature in scanning software or a full PDF editor, or simply rescanning the page. Likewise, if a page has the right orientation but the content on it is mirrored, rotation will not help, because a mirror image needs to be flipped rather than turned.

If what you really want is a different page order, or to remove pages that are not needed, use our Organise PDF Pages tool, which lets you drag pages into place, delete or duplicate them and insert blank pages. To combine the corrected file with other documents, use Merge PDF. Password-protected PDFs need unlocking with the program that created them before any of these tools can open them.

Everyday situations where rotation helps

Rotation problems turn up in all sorts of ordinary paperwork. A landlord scans a signed tenancy agreement and two pages come out upside down. An accounts team receives supplier invoices photographed on a phone, some of them sideways. A school sends home a permission form with a landscape timetable attached the wrong way round. In each case the fix takes seconds: load the file, click the pages that are wrong, and save.

It is also worth rotating before you combine or share documents. If you are about to merge several scans into one bundle, fixing each file first means the finished bundle reads cleanly from start to finish, and the person receiving it does not have to keep turning their screen or printout to read it.

Examples you can copy

3           -> page 3 only
2, 4-6      -> pages 2, 4, 5 and 6
10-end      -> page 10 to the last page
odd         -> pages 1, 3, 5 ...
even        -> pages 2, 4, 6 ...

Selected pages: even
Rotation:       180°
Press Apply, then Save rotated PDF

qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=+90:2,4-6

qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=180

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions