Rotate PDF

Fix sideways pages — all of them, or only a chosen range.

Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded — your input is processed on this device and discarded when you close the tab.

Your file

Drop a PDF file here, or click to browse. One file at a time, up to 50 MB. Everything is processed on this device only — no file is uploaded.

Pages to rotate All pages Only the pages in a range

Page range

Pages are numbered from 1 and ranges are inclusive. Used only when “Only the pages in a range” is chosen above.

Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise 180 degrees 270 degrees clockwise (90 degrees the other way)

The angle is added to any rotation a page already has, so a page already turned 90 degrees that is rotated by 90 more ends at 180 degrees.

Rotate PDF

A page that opens sideways makes its reader do the turning instead. Rotate PDF fixes orientation where it should be fixed — inside the file. Pages are turned by a quarter turn, a half turn or three quarters of a turn, and that instruction is stored in the saved document, so every viewer, printer and mail preview from then on shows the page the correct way up.

Orientation trouble is rarely uniform across a document. Perhaps an entire bundle went through a scanner in landscape, or perhaps twelve honest portrait pages surround a single landscape table that a phone captured upside down. Accordingly, you can apply a turn to the whole document, or aim it at a typed range while everything outside that range is deliberately left as it is. One subtlety governs the arithmetic: the turn you choose is added to whatever rotation a page already carries, never substituted for it — which is exactly what makes the behaviour predictable once you know a page's starting state. All of this is settled locally in your browser, by the way; the file is opened on your device, adjusted there, and returned as a download, with the original left in its pre-existing state.

How to use Rotate PDF

1. Load the document whose orientation is wrong. Drag it across or browse for it — a single file, at most 50 MB. On arrival you will see how many pages it contains, and if the file is damaged, or guarded by a password, that fact is reported with its name attached before you configure anything.
2. Decide which pages the turn applies to. The broad option, “All pages”, covers the entire document. Alternatively select “Only the pages in a range” and identify the affected sheets, something along the lines of 2-4,7, counting from 1 and letting each span include its endpoints.
3. Select the size of the turn. Choose between 90, 180 and 270 degrees. Bear the addition rule in mind while choosing: a page stored at 90 degrees, given another 90, settles at 180 — it does not snap back to 90 or reset to upright.
4. Press Rotate PDF. Each targeted page has its stored rotation updated, and the document is saved in that state. Nothing on the face of any page is redrawn; what changes is the rotation value, which is precisely the value viewers consult when deciding how a page should be presented.
5. Examine the download critically. Look for the “-rotated” ending on its name, open it, and satisfy yourself that the pages you aimed at now stand upright while the pages beyond the range look exactly as they did before.
6. Apply a second turn when one is not enough. Only quarter turns exist here, and they accumulate across runs. Saving and then running the saved copy through once more adds a further turn, so any final orientation can be reached by composing turns.

Features

• Three turn sizes are offered — 90, 180 and 270 degrees — recorded as genuine PDF page rotation, the kind every reader application respects.
• Scope is yours to set: one instruction covering the whole file, or a scope confined to the pages a validated range string picks out.
• Existing rotation is respected arithmetically. Chosen angles are summed with what a page already has, then normalised back onto a quarter turn, so previously rotated pages advance rather than being clobbered to a standard setting.
• The intervention is surgical: wording, imagery and everything drawn on the page stay untouched, and the file's size barely moves as a consequence.
• Mistakes in the request itself — a number greater than the page count, a span written in reverse, a requested angle that is not a multiple of a quarter turn — are rejected with an explanation of the specific problem.
• Results adopt the source's name and gain a “-rotated” suffix, and the file you started with is not overwritten in the process.

Worked example

Start with four pages, every one of them upright, and apply a 90-degree turn to the range 2-3. Read the saved document's stored rotations back in sequence and they are 0, 90, 90, 0: the middle pairing has turned, the opening and closing pages are precisely as they began.

Contrast a second document whose opening page already has 90 degrees stored against it — a condition scanners produce constantly. Apply 90 degrees across that whole document. The opening page finishes at 180 degrees, since its existing 90 and the newly added 90 combine to make 180, whereas each remaining page, having started from 0, finishes at 90.

Reading the output files and checking those figures page by page — the pre-rotated case included — is literally what this tool's automated test suite does, which is why the “added, not replaced” description above can be stated as fact rather than intention.

Common errors and limitations

• A single document per run, capped at 50 MB in size.
• Quarter turns are the entire vocabulary: 90, 180, 270. A sheet that went through a scanner crooked by three or four degrees cannot be levelled here — that is deskewing, a job for an image editor, not a change of stored rotation.
• Stored rotation governs how a page is presented, not what is painted on it. When the picture on a page is itself sideways within the stored content, adjusting presentation cannot repair it; the content has to be corrected at source.
• Encryption blocks the job outright: a password-guarded document cannot be opened and will be refused by name. Export an unguarded version from the creating application and rotate that version in its place.
• Not every producer records orientation in the standard location. A minority build it into a transformation of the page content instead, and pages made that way may appear unaffected by work done here, which concerns itself strictly with the standard rotation value that viewers honour.

• Counting on one turn to restore an upright page regardless of its history. What you select is added to the page's present state. A page already sitting at 270 degrees reaches upright with a further 90, not with 270; if an attempt lands a page in the wrong orientation, establish where it has actually ended up and choose the turn that completes the full circle from there.
• Turning an entire file to repair a single sheet. Mixed orientation is the everyday case, not the exception. Aim the range scope at the sideways pages only; rotating everything at once repairs the twelfth page by breaking the eleven that were already right.
• Mixing up the two quarter turns. 90 and 270 rotate in opposite senses. When a portrait page's top edge needs to travel rightwards, 90 is the correct selection in this tool; should a result face the unintended way, either give the result a 180 turn to flip it, or return to the original and use 270.
• Trusting a familiar thumbnail over the fresh download. Viewer software caches previews, and a stale preview can be served for a file whose name resembles an earlier one. Judge by opening the “-rotated” file itself — or inspect its stored rotation in the viewer's page panel — before deciding the turn had no effect.

Frequently asked questions

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