The scan came out sideways? Rotate the PDF and save it for good

Rotate a PDF and save it in four steps

1. Open Rotate PDF and choose the file, or drop it on the page. Every page appears as a thumbnail, drawn the way it is turned now.
2. Choose the pages: All pages, Odd pages, Even pages or Selected pages. For a selection, tick thumbnails or type numbers like 1-3, 5, 8-.
3. Press Right 90°, Left 90° or Upside down 180°. The thumbnails turn at once, and Reset takes every turn back.
4. Press the big button, check the preview of the new file, and download it.

The turn is saved inside the file, so viewers apply it when they show the page and printing follows it. The work happens in your browser, so the PDF is never uploaded.

Why your viewer's rotate button does not stick

Every page in a PDF carries a small number that tells a viewer how to turn it before showing it: 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees clockwise. Rotating here changes that one number. The text, the pictures and the drawing instructions are not opened, redrawn or recompressed, so a scan stays exactly as sharp as it was, and the job is usually quick, even for a large file.

Many viewers have a rotate button that only changes your own view, and the view is forgotten when you close the file. Others change the page but save it only when you save the file, which in some programs replaces the original. What a given button does depends on the program and its version, so use this test: rotate, close the file, open it again. If it is sideways again, the turn was only a view.

Which pages, and which way

Look at one thumbnail and match it to a row. When you are unsure, press a button: the thumbnails turn at once, and Reset undoes everything.

Turns add up. A page that is already turned 90 degrees and gets 90 more ends at 180, and a full circle changes nothing.

Rotate one page, or fix mixed orientations

To rotate one page in a PDF, choose Selected pages and tick its thumbnail, or type its number. A single page also has its own turn buttons. A scan of mixed sheets is the usual reason: some were fed in sideways, so a few pages need a quarter turn and the rest are fine.

Double sided scanners sometimes return every back upside down. The backs are the even pages, so choose Even pages and press Upside down 180°. When the fronts are the problem, choose Odd pages instead.

The portrait and landscape helpers are quicker for a document that mixes both shapes. All portrait turns a quarter right every page that is wider than it is tall, and All landscape does the opposite. Pages whose two sides differ by less than half a percent count as square and are left alone. The helpers always turn to the right, so if a page ends up with its text upside down, give that page Upside down 180°.

If you are joining files, you can also turn a single page before it is joined: in Merge PDF, Choose pages opens a thumbnail grid with turn buttons. The guide to combining PDF files covers that.

Rotate PDF or Organize PDF: which one

Organize PDF turns pages too, along with moving, deleting, duplicating and adding pages in one thumbnail view, with undo. It builds a new file from copied pages, so bookmarks, form fields and page labels are not kept. Rotate PDF edits your file and saves it, so those stay. For the order side of the job, see rearrange pages in a PDF.

What goes wrong, and the fix

• A page is turned the wrong way. Press the opposite button, or Reset and start again. Because turns add up, two presses of Right 90° are the same as one 180°.
• The scan is crooked, not sideways. A PDF page can only be turned by 90, 180 or 270 degrees, so a scan at a slight angle cannot be straightened here. That means changing the picture itself, which this tool does not do.
• The file is refused. A PDF protected with a password or permission settings is encrypted, and ClipLime cannot decrypt files. If you are allowed to, print or export it to a new PDF without protection in a viewer, and turn that copy.
• The signature broke. A digital signature covers the exact bytes of the file as it was signed, so rewriting the file, as this tool does, stops it verifying. Keep the signed original and send the turned copy as a convenience version.

What the new file keeps

The file is edited and saved, not rebuilt from copied pages. Bookmarks, links inside the file and to websites, comments and highlights, fillable form fields and what has been typed into them, page labels such as roman numerals, layers, accessibility tags and the document properties all stay. The page content is byte for byte the same.

The file is written again, so its size can move a little, and a file whose small objects were not packed before can come out smaller. The file is read into your browser's memory, which takes several times its size. ClipLime warns you when a file is large for your device, around 60 MB on a phone and roughly 120 to 250 MB on a computer, depending on its memory.

Check it, then do the next job

Open the download in a different viewer than the one you normally use, such as your browser, and look at the first page, a middle page and the last. For double sided scans, check one front and one back.

Turn first, then everything else. A page number is placed on the page as it is displayed, so on a page that still looks sideways it lands along the wrong edge of the content. Once the pages are upright, add page numbers, combine the files, or run the result through Reduce PDF size if it has to fit an email. The guide to splitting a PDF into pages helps when only a few sheets need handling.