How to rotate a PDF and save it

To rotate a PDF and save it, open the file at pdfviewer.work, click the rotate control on the page thumbnail until the page is upright, then click Download. The rotation is written into the new file, so it stays rotated in every reader, unlike the view-only rotate in most browser PDF viewers.

Rotate a PDF and keep it rotated: three steps

1. Open the PDF. Drop it here, on the rotate tool page, or click Open a PDF.
2. Rotate the page. In the thumbnail sidebar, find the sideways page and click its rotate control. Each click turns it 90 degrees; click twice for an upside-down page. Do the same for every page that needs it.
3. Click Download. The new PDF stores the rotation inside each page, so it opens upright in Acrobat, Preview, Chrome, on a phone and in email previews.

Rotation is applied per page. A scan where every other page is upside down (common with duplex scanners) takes one click per affected page; the thumbnails make it quick to spot which ones.

Why rotating in Chrome or Acrobat Reader does not stick

Most viewers have two different rotations. View rotation turns the page on your screen and forgets it when you close the file; this is what the rotate button in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Acrobat Reader does. Page rotation changes the page's /Rotate attribute inside the PDF, which every reader honors. Only the second one survives a save, and most free readers do not offer it.

The viewer here changes page rotation and writes a new file on Download. The Chrome PDF viewer comparison covers the other things Chrome's built-in viewer cannot save.

Rotate and save on Mac, Windows, iPhone and the command line

Preview is the right answer on a Mac if you already have it open; see PDF Viewer vs Preview for a longer comparison.

Rotate first, then everything else

Rotation is usually the first fix in a longer cleanup of a scan, and the order matters. Rotate the sideways pages while the thumbnails make them easy to spot. Then delete blank or duplicate pages, which renumbers the rest. Then drag pages into order if the scanner fed them wrongly. Then, if you need search, run OCR on the upright pages. Finally click Download once; every change is written together into the new file.

Two scanner habits produce most sideways PDFs. Feeding a landscape sheet through a portrait scanner yields a page turned 90 degrees; one click fixes it. A duplex scanner that flips the sheet on its short edge yields every even page upside down; those need two clicks each. In both cases the page content is unchanged; only the instruction telling readers how to display it changes.

If you merged several files and one came in sideways, the same per-page rotate applies inside the merged document, so there is no need to fix the source file separately.

Troubleshooting

• Every page needs rotating. Click rotate on each thumbnail; the viewer rotates per page. For a 200-page scan, the qpdf command above with --rotate=+90 is faster.
• The page is rotated but the text in it is still sideways after OCR. Rotate first, then run OCR, so the engine sees upright text; see make a scanned PDF searchable.
• The file asks for a password. The viewer cannot open it until the open password is removed.
• The thumbnail looks upright but the page is not. Zoom in on the page itself before deciding; thumbnails are small, and a 180-degree flip of a text-light page is easy to miss at that size.
• Rotated the wrong page. Click rotate three more times to bring it back around, or reload and open the original; the original is never modified.
• Quality concerns. Rotation changes a page attribute, not the content. Nothing is re-rendered or recompressed, so text and images are untouched.

Frequently asked questions