How to Rotate a PDF and Save It Permanently

Most PDF viewers, including Adobe Acrobat Reader and browser viewers, have a rotate view button. It turns the page on your screen, but it does not change the file. Close it, send it to someone else, or open it on another device, and the page is sideways again.

To fix the problem for everyone, the rotation has to be saved into the PDF itself. Each page in a PDF has a rotation setting that every reader respects. Rotate PDF changes that setting and saves a new copy.

Rotate PDF runs in your browser, so the document is not uploaded.

1. Open Rotate PDF and select your document. Enter the password if it is protected.
2. To rotate the whole document, use the rotate all buttons to turn every page 90 degrees left or right.
3. To rotate individual pages, use the controls on each page thumbnail.
4. Check the thumbnails until every page is upright.
5. Save and download the rotated PDF.

When an entire scan was fed into the scanner sideways, rotate all pages at once. When a document mixes portrait and landscape pages, such as a report with a wide table or chart, rotate only the pages that need it. Rotating twice in the same direction turns a page upside down, which fixes pages scanned the wrong way up.

Rotating a page by 90 degrees turns a portrait page into a landscape one, with the content turned along with it. If you want the content to stay upright on a wider page, that is a layout change rather than a rotation, and it is best made in the original source document before exporting to PDF.

If you are combining several scans, rotate each one before merging so the merged file needs no further fixes. If you have already merged, rotate the combined file instead; individual page controls make it easy to fix a single sideways page in a long document. Use Rearrange PDF afterwards if any pages are in the wrong order.