Rotate PDF
Turn pages the right way up, permanently.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
Rotation in a PDF is a property of the page rather than a change to its contents, which means turning a page costs nothing in quality and almost nothing in file size. This tool writes that property permanently, so the document opens the right way up everywhere.
Use it when a scanner produced sideways pages, when a phone photo was saved into a PDF at the wrong orientation, or when a document mixes portrait text with landscape tables that came out rotated the wrong way.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page.
- Choose how far to turn: 90 degrees clockwise, 180 to flip upside-down pages, or 270 for 90 anticlockwise.
- Narrow it down if you need to - a page range, or only the portrait or only the landscape pages.
- Press Rotate.
- The download starts on its own.
Rotating in a PDF viewer and rotating here are different things. A viewer turns the page for your session and forgets; this writes the rotation into the file, so it survives sending, printing and opening on another device. That is the difference people are usually looking for when they search for how to rotate a PDF permanently.
The landscape-only and portrait-only filters exist because mixed documents are the common case. A report where the tables were scanned sideways needs only those pages turned, and picking them out by hand from a hundred pages is exactly the kind of tedium a tool should absorb.
Add rotates relative to whatever the page already has, which is what you want when different pages start at different angles. Set replaces the existing value, which is what you want when a document has inconsistent rotations and you want them all made the same.
Because nothing is re-rendered, a rotated scan keeps its original image data at full resolution and rotated text stays selectable and searchable.
Questions people ask
- Is the rotation saved into the file, or just for viewing?
- It is saved into the file. The page's rotation attribute is written to disk, so the document opens correctly for anyone you send it to, and prints correctly too. This is different from the rotate button in a PDF reader, which usually only affects your current view.
- Only some of my pages are sideways. Can I fix just those?
- Yes, in two ways. Give a page range to rotate only those pages, or set the filter to landscape only or portrait only so the tool picks them out for you based on how each page currently displays.
- Does rotating reduce quality or increase file size?
- Neither. Rotation changes a single number on each page rather than redrawing anything, so the content is bit-for-bit identical and the file size changes by a few bytes at most.
- My PDF reader still shows it sideways. Why?
- Almost always because the reader still has the old version open. Close and reopen the downloaded file. If it persists, the page content itself may have been drawn rotated inside an upright page, which rotation cannot fix - in that case rotate by 90 the other way and compare.