Rotate and save as a new file
The tool does more than change how your PDF looks on screen. It writes the new orientation into a new PDF file that you download. The file you selected stays unchanged.
- Click “Choose PDF” and select a PDF of at most 50 MiB and 250 pages. You edit one file per run.
- In the “Pages” field, specify which pages should change. If the field stays empty, as it is when you open the tool, all pages are rotated.
- Choose the rotation: 90° to the right is the default. The other options are 180° and 90° to the left.
- Click “Rotate pages” and look at the result preview.
- Download the new PDF and then open the saved file again on its own, for example in your usual PDF program.
Example: beispiel.pdf becomes beispiel-gedreht.pdf. If the page is upright in this downloaded file, the rotation has been saved. The preview in the tool shows you the result in advance. However, the file you send or print is the saved one, and that is exactly the file you should look at. If you change the file, the page selection or the rotation after rotating, the previous result is discarded. In that case, simply start again.
Rotating the view vs. changing the file
Many PDF programs have a command such as “Rotate View”. It rotates the display on your screen so that you can read more comfortably. Whether any of this ends up in the file when you save depends on the program and its settings. This is why a PDF can look right in the viewer and still be sideways again after saving or on another device.
Here, by contrast, the orientation of the page itself is recorded in the new PDF. Still, check the downloaded file, not the original and not a window that is still open from before. Only the saved copy shows you what you are actually passing on.
Example: You straightened a sideways page in the viewer using “Rotate View”. When you reopen the file, the page is sideways again, because only the view was rotated. If you rotate the page here, download the new PDF and open it again, the page is upright. That means the orientation is saved in the file.
Individual pages or the whole document
As long as the “Pages” field is empty, as it is when you open the tool, the rotation applies to all pages. If you only want to rotate certain pages, enter their position, such as 2. Separate multiple pages with commas. Combine consecutive pages into a range with a hyphen, from the smaller to the larger number: 1, 3-5 rotates pages 1, 3, 4 and 5. Especially in long documents, this is faster than clicking each page individually under “Click to select pages”. Each page may appear only once. If you list a page twice or enter a number that does not exist in your PDF, the tool does not accept the input. All pages you do not select keep their previous orientation.
“Clear selection”, on the other hand, means that no page is selected. In this case, the tool does not simply rotate all pages. It only starts once you mark at least one page again or click “Select all”. If you delete the entry in the field yourself using the keyboard, the empty field can again stand for all pages. So before clicking “Rotate pages”, take a quick look at what is currently marked.
The numbers count the pages in the order in which they appear in the file. Printed page numbers play no role. Example: if your document starts with a cover page and a table of contents without numbers, the page with the printed 1 is the third page in the file. So you choose 3.
Choosing the right rotation
Go by what you currently see on the page. The selected rotation does not set a fixed final position. It turns the page further from its current position, and it turns all selected pages by the same amount.
90° to the left is the same as 270° clockwise. In the file, the new position is calculated as the previous rotation plus the selected rotation. From 360° onward, the count starts again at 0°.
Page 2 is then upright, and page 1 stays as it was. If page 2 had previously been at 0°, the same selection would give 0° + 270° = 270°, and the page would then be sideways. That is why the position you see in front of you counts, not a target number.
Different directions in one PDF
In each run, one rotation applies to all selected pages. If you need different directions, such as page 2 to the right and page 5 to the left, work in two steps: first rotate page 2 and download the new PDF. Then select exactly this downloaded file to rotate page 5.
Pay attention to which file you select. If you take a PDF that has already been rotated and rotate the same page again, the rotations add up: twice 90° to the right makes 180°. If you select the unchanged original again instead, the page is rotated only once, no matter how often you repeat this.
Checking the result and the content
When rotating, the tool changes the stored orientation of the pages. The pages are neither converted into JPG images nor deliberately recompressed for this. So this rotation does not involve any intended loss of quality.
The whole page is always rotated. A photo on the page is not mirrored, nothing is cropped, no margins are added, and the paper size and pixels stay as they are. No text recognition takes place either. Still, a quick look at the saved file is worthwhile:
- Does the text on each changed page run in the correct reading direction?
- Are the pages still in the usual order?
- Is the content of each page fully visible?
- Are comments, highlights and links still in place? If your PDF contains such elements, the tool points this out to you.
Example: In a scanned set of documents, page 4 was upside down. After rotating it by 180°, you open the saved PDF and check: is page 4 upright, do pages 3, 4 and 5 still follow one another, and is the highlight on page 4 still visible? Then the copy is ready.
If you want to print the PDF, open the saved file and look at the print preview. The tool does not set landscape printing. You choose portrait or landscape and fitting to the paper in the print dialog, and the result may vary depending on the program and printer.
Once everything is the right way up, you can continue: remove unnecessary pages, combine several aligned PDFs or reduce the size of the PDF afterwards if it is too large to send. Rotating on its own is not a way to make a file smaller.
Frequently asked questions about rotation and limits
Slightly skewed scans
This tool cannot straighten a page that was scanned slightly skewed. It only rotates by 90°, 180° or 270°. A page that shifted by about 5° during scanning stays skewed by exactly those 5° after any of these rotations. There is no freely selectable angle and no automatic straightening. For such a document, a new, straight scan helps, or another program that explicitly offers straightening.
If photographed pages are only sideways or upside down, however, this tool is a good fit. If you still have individual images instead of a PDF, you can save the phone photos as a PDF first and then rotate individual pages here by 90° or 180°.
Unsupported documents
Some PDFs contain features that could be damaged or lose their validity when pages are changed. The tool rejects such files instead of altering them:
- digitally signed or certified PDFs
- password-protected or encrypted PDFs
- PDFs with fillable form fields
- PDF portfolios and PDFs with embedded files
- PDFs with layers
The tool does not remove passwords and cannot keep a digital signature valid. You need a normal, unprotected version of the PDF that you are allowed to edit. A scanned signature that only appears as an image on the page is not a digital signature in this sense and does not lead to rejection on its own. However, the tool cannot judge whether a rotated document remains legally valid for your purpose.
Several PDFs at once
In each run, you rotate the pages of a single PDF of up to 50 MiB and 250 pages. The rotated file may be at most 100 MiB. For more files, simply select the next PDF after downloading. If some pages in the same PDF should be rotated differently from others, select the saved file again for a second run. Here, as in the other tools, this only works up to 50 MiB per file. Rotating does not reliably make a PDF smaller, so check the size of the saved file first. If it is larger than that, continue editing it with a suitable PDF program on your device.