Rotate PDF pages

Every scanner produces this file eventually: some pages upright, some on their side, one upside down because the page went in the wrong way. Your reader lets you rotate the view, but that setting lives in your reader — the person you send it to still gets it sideways. This writes the rotation into the document itself.

When you need this

• A scan came out with some pages landscape and some portrait.
• A page went into the feeder upside down and nobody noticed until later.
• A phone-scanned document is rotated because the phone was held sideways.
• You are merging files from different sources and the orientations disagree.

Viewing versus saving

Rotating in Acrobat, Preview or a browser viewer usually changes only how you see it. Close the file and it is sideways again, and it was always sideways for everyone else. Rotation here is written into the page itself, so it travels with the document.

Rotating some pages, not all

Click the pages that are wrong and leave the rest alone. The thumbnails turn as you change the angle, so you can see the result before committing. Odd and even selection is useful for double-sided scans, where every second page came out the wrong way round.

Nothing is re-rendered

Rotation changes a single value on the page, not its contents. Text stays text, images keep their original data, and the file size barely moves. This is a metadata edit, not a conversion.