HowtorotateaPDFsotherotationsticks

Rotating the view versus rotating the document

Most PDF readers rotate what you are looking at. It is a display setting, it lives in the reader, and it is forgotten the moment the file is closed — or the moment the file is opened by anybody else.

Rotating the document changes a value stored on the page itself, inside the file. Every reader honours it, printers honour it, and it survives being emailed. That is what you want when a scan came in sideways.

Fixing only the pages that are wrong

Scans are rarely uniformly wrong. A twenty-page document with three landscape tables usually needs those three turned and nothing else.

Naming pages — 2, 5-9 — turns exactly those and leaves the rest alone. Leaving the selection empty turns everything, which is the right answer for a document that came off the scanner the wrong way round as a whole.

It costs nothing in quality

Rotation is a number on a page object, not a transformation of its contents. Nothing is re-rendered, the file size does not change, and text stays selectable. Rotating four times returns you exactly where you started, byte for byte.

Sideways versus upside down

If the page is 90° out, the fix is one turn in the right direction and it is obvious which. If it is 180° out — common when a sheet feeder pulls a stack the wrong way — every page usually needs the same 180° turn, and it is worth checking whether the pages are also in reverse order while you are there.