Rotate pages
What Rotate pages actually does
Almost every PDF reader has a rotate button, and on most of them it is a view setting: it turns the page on your screen for as long as the window is open and writes nothing at all to the file. Send that document to somebody else and it arrives sideways again. This page writes the angle into the page itself, which is what makes the correction survive the trip. The turn is added to whatever the page already carries rather than replacing it, so a page a scanner already recorded as ninety degrees and a page it recorded as zero both move by the amount you asked for, and a mixed feeder full of pages at different angles can be corrected in passes instead of all at once. Page selection uses the same grammar the command line tool parses, so a scan where only sheets four through nine went in upside down is nine pages of work rather than a whole document. Everything happens in this tab: the file is opened here, turned here, and handed back as a download, and nothing is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Choose the PDF. It is read in this tab and stays there.
- Leave the page box empty to turn everything, or list the pages that need it, for example 4-9 or 2,5,11.
- Pick the quarter turn: ninety degrees clockwise, a hundred and eighty for an upside-down page, or two hundred and seventy.
- Check the table, which reports the angle each page will carry after the turn is added.
- Download. The rotated file opens at the new angle everywhere.
Useful for
- Straighten a batch scan where the feeder took some sheets in landscape.
- Fix a single upside-down page in an otherwise correct document before circulating it.
- Turn a spreadsheet or drawing printed to PDF in portrait so it reads as landscape.
- Correct orientation before an imposition or booklet step, which reads the stored angle rather than guessing.
Limits worth knowing
- Turns are quarter turns only. A page scanned at a slight skew is not straightened here, because that needs the content resampled rather than the page entry changed.
- The turn is added to the page's existing angle. Rotating a page twice by ninety leaves it at a hundred and eighty, which is arithmetic rather than a fault.
- Nothing on the page is moved. Text that ran off the edge before still runs off the edge, now in a different direction.
- Pages past the fortieth are turned and downloaded but not drawn in the board.
Questions people ask
Why does my reader's rotate button not stick?
On most readers it changes the view for the current session and never touches the file. The angle has to be written into the page entry to travel with the document, which is what happens here.
Can different pages get different angles?
Yes, by running the pages that need one angle, then the pages that need another. Each pass adds to what is already there.
Does this re-render or degrade the page?
No. The page content is untouched; only the stored orientation changes, so text stays text and images keep their original data.
Is the file uploaded?
No. It is opened, turned and downloaded in this tab.