How to Fix Sideways or Upside-Down PDF Pages

You open a scanned PDF and half the pages are lying on their side, or one page is upside down. Perhaps the scanner fed a sheet in the wrong way, or a phone camera saved a landscape photo without the right orientation flag. Turning your head works for a moment, but the recipient will see the same problem unless you save a corrected file. Here is how to fix it for good.

Why pages end up rotated

Every PDF page carries a rotation value of 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, which tells viewers how to display it. A scanner may write the pages as they come off the glass, a page may be a landscape table placed on a portrait sheet, or a conversion may have ignored the orientation recorded by the camera. Viewers have a temporary "rotate view" command, but that only changes what you see on your screen. To change what other people see, the rotation stored in the file has to change.

Rotating with the tool

1. Open the Rotate PDF tool and add your file.
2. Choose how far to turn the pages clockwise: 90 degrees fixes a page that is lying on its left side, 180 fixes an upside-down page, and 270 fixes a page lying on its right side.
3. Leave the pages box empty to rotate every page, or enter page numbers such as 2,4 or 3-6 to rotate only those.
4. Press Convert, download the file and review it.

The rotation is added to whatever each page already had. A page already turned 90 degrees and then rotated by another 90 becomes 180. The content of the pages is not re-rendered or resampled, only the stored orientation changes, so there is no quality loss. Like the other tools on this site, it runs inside your browser, so the document is not uploaded.

Working out the right angle

Look at the page as it appears now. Imagine turning your phone clockwise until the text is upright.

• Text reads from bottom to top (the top of the page is on the left): rotate 90.
• Text is upside down: rotate 180.
• Text reads from top to bottom (the top of the page is on the right): rotate 270.

If you are not sure, try 90 on the affected pages and check. It costs nothing to run the tool again on the original.

When only some pages are wrong

Mixed documents are common: most pages are fine, but pages 3 and 7 were fed sideways. Enter 3,7 in the pages box and the rest stay untouched. If you cannot tell which pages are wrong without scrolling, write the numbers down from your viewer first, as it shows the position in the file, not any printed page number.

Landscape pages on purpose

Not every sideways page is a mistake. A wide spreadsheet or a diagram may be intentionally landscape, and viewers handle that automatically if the page is stored that way. If a page looks correct on one device and wrong on another, the file probably relies on a rotation flag that one program ignores. Saving a corrected copy with a consistent orientation removes the ambiguity.

Check the result carefully

1. Open the new file in a different viewer from the one you used before, for example a browser as well as a desktop PDF program.
2. Scroll through every page. A tool cannot know which way up your content should be, so you are the quality check.
3. Confirm the page count has not changed.
4. Make sure the file name is clear, such as report-rotated.pdf, and keep the original until the new copy has been accepted.

If the PDF will not rotate

The file is password protected. Protected PDFs cannot be opened by the tool. Save an unprotected copy in a viewer you trust, with the password, and use that.

A signed PDF. Digital signatures apply to the exact file as signed, and changing the rotation changes the file. Keep the signed original as the authoritative version and use the rotated copy for reading.

A page is still wrong. The problem may be inside the page, such as a scan of a photographed sheet that was itself taken sideways. Rotation still fixes it, but you might need a different angle from the one you tried first.

Prevent the problem next time

When scanning, place every sheet the same way and check the scanner's orientation setting. When photographing pages with a phone, hold it in the same orientation for each shot. If you assemble a PDF from photos, our guide on turning phone photos into one PDF explains how the orientation is handled, and the image rotator can straighten a picture before it goes into the document. To join the corrected file with others, see how to merge PDF files.