About Rotate PDF
Scanned documents arrive sideways constantly. A batch scanner feeding pages in landscape, a phone capture held the wrong way, a fax gateway that rotates everything — the result is a PDF you have to tilt your head to read. This fixes the rotation and saves it permanently.
Your pages appear as a wall of thumbnails, and you turn them by pressing a button on each part — the button shows the angle those pages will carry, so there is no separate setting to go and check. The pages themselves turn as you press, which means you are looking at the result rather than at a description of it. Rotation happens in 90-degree steps because that is what the PDF format stores: a page carries a rotation value of 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, and readers apply it when displaying. Arbitrary angles are not possible without re-rendering the page as an image, which would destroy the text layer.
Rotating only some pages. Split the document into parts and give each one its own angle, or switch to *Pick pages*, select the ones you want and rotate just those. Mixed-orientation scans are the common case — a document where only the landscape pages need turning — and both routes leave everything else untouched. The page range box accepts the same format as our other PDF tools, so `1-3, 5, 8-` selects those pages directly.
Rotation is cumulative. The angle you set is added to whatever the page already carries, so a page stored at 90 that you turn by 90 ends up at 180. That is usually what you want when correcting a scan, but it does mean running the tool twice over the whole document turns it twice. If a result looks wrong, start again from the original rather than correcting a correction.
Nothing is re-rendered. Only the rotation flag on each page changes. Text stays selectable, links keep working, embedded fonts and images are untouched, and the file size is essentially unchanged. This is a metadata edit, not a conversion, so there is no quality loss whatsoever.
What it will not fix. A page scanned at a slight angle — three degrees off true — cannot be corrected here, because that is a property of the scanned image rather than the page rotation. Deskewing requires re-rendering. Similarly, a page whose *content* is upside down inside an otherwise correctly-oriented page is a content problem, not a rotation one.
Password-protected documents cannot be modified and are reported rather than silently failing.
Questions
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The rotation is applied in your browser and the document is never transmitted.
Can I rotate only some pages?
Yes. Split the document into parts and rotate each separately, or switch to Pick pages and select the ones you want. The page range box also accepts a list like 1-3, 5.
Does rotating reduce quality or increase file size?
Neither. Only the page rotation value changes — nothing is re-rendered, so text stays selectable and the size is essentially unchanged.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle to fix a crooked scan?
No. PDF stores rotation in 90-degree steps. Correcting a slight skew means re-rendering the page as an image, which loses the text layer.