How to rotate pages in a PDF and save the rotation for good

How to rotate the pages of a PDF

Rotating a PDF in AtlasDocs takes three clicks: tick the crooked pages in the thumbnails, pick the angle (90°, 180° or 270°) and click "Rotate and download". With no page ticked, the turn applies to the whole file. The PDF downloads with the suffix -rotated, and the rotation is saved inside the file: any reader, on any device, opens the pages the right way up. Everything happens in your browser.

1. Open the Rotate PDF tool and upload your file. With more than one PDF in the list, pick which one to rotate under "Document": the tool works on one file at a time.
2. Click the thumbnails of the crooked pages; the counter shows "2 pages selected". For the whole file, tick nothing ("No pages selected = rotate all.") or use "Select all".
3. Pick the angle from the list: "90°" (a quarter turn to the right), "180°" (upside down) or "270°" (a quarter turn to the left). The default is 90°.
4. Click "Rotate and download". The PDF downloads with the suffix -rotated in its name and opens the right way up in any reader.

The turn is stored as a page attribute, not as a redrawn image: the content stays the same, with selectable text and the same quality. And it adds to whatever the page already had, so if you picked the wrong direction, just rotate again: 90° plus 270° brings the page back to where it started.

Rotating in the viewer is not the same as saving the rotation

Here's the catch that wastes a lot of people's time: some PDF readers have a rotate button, but it only straightens the page on screen for that moment. Close the file, open it again, and the page is crooked once more, because the rotation was never written down. To fix it for good, the rotation has to be saved inside the file, so that anyone who opens the PDF, in any program, sees the pages the right way up. That is what the tool does, and that's why the result holds on the recipient's phone, in print and in the form attachment.

Which angle to choose

• Page lying on its side with the top of the text facing left: "90°" stands it up.
• Page lying on its side with the top of the text facing right: "270°" stands it up.
• Page upside down: "180°".
• Wrong direction? Rotate again with the missing angle: turns add up, and 90° + 270° (or 180° + 180°) returns to the original.
• Unsure between 90° and 270°? Rotate a single page, open the file and check; then repeat for the others.

Pages needing different turns in the same file

A scanned batch usually mixes everything: some sheets sideways one way, others the other way, one upside down. Since the tool applies one angle per pass, do one pass per case: tick the pages that need 90°, rotate and download; upload the downloaded file, tick the ones that need 270°, rotate and download again. Because each turn adds to what the page already has, the pages you've already fixed aren't affected in the next pass, as long as they stay unticked.

What the tool doesn't do

• It doesn't straighten a slightly tilted page: the turns are only 90°, 180° and 270°. A scan skewed by 3 degrees stays skewed.
• It doesn't reorder pages. If the scanner also shuffled the sequence, use Reorder PDF pages after rotating.
• It doesn't rotate JPG or PNG. For a photo taken with the phone sideways, use Rotate image, which does the same for image files.
• It doesn't rotate several PDFs at once: with more than one file in the list, you pick one under "Document" and repeat for the next.

If the problem isn't just orientation but also order (page 3 came before page 2 because the scanner pulled two sheets together), run the rotated file through the Reorder PDF pages tool: it shows the thumbnails and lets you fix the sequence before sending.

And if what's crooked is the photo rather than the PDF (a receipt photographed with the phone sideways, say), rotate the image before turning it into a PDF. The Rotate image tool does that for JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF, also in your browser. See how to rotate and flip an image that's sideways or mirrored.

Everything happens in your browser: the PDF you rotate is never sent to any server. The document never leaves your computer.

After rotating, flip through the whole document once: in a scanned stack, a crooked page among the others slips by easily.