Rotate PDF pages

Turn a sideways scan the right way up, or fix the one landscape page in the middle of a portrait report. You can rotate the whole document or name specific pages, and nothing in the file is rasterised — text stays selectable and searchable exactly as it was.

How to use it

1. Open the Rotate PDF tool and drop in your document.
2. Choose 90°, 180° or 270° clockwise.
3. Optionally list the pages to rotate — leave it blank to rotate all of them.
4. Rotate, then download the corrected PDF.

Rotation is an instruction, not a redraw

A PDF page carries a rotation property that tells a viewer how far to turn the page before displaying it. Rotating a PDF properly means changing that number — not re-drawing the content at a different angle, and certainly not turning the page into a picture of itself.

That is what slimdocs does, and it is why the operation is completely lossless. Text stays real text, links keep working, vector diagrams stay sharp at any zoom, and the file size barely moves. A tool that instead flattens each page into a rotated image would destroy all of that, and you would notice the moment you tried to search the document or copy a paragraph out of it.

Rotating only the pages that need it

Scanned documents often have a single page that came through the feeder sideways, or a wide table that was deliberately scanned in landscape. Rotating the entire file would fix that one page and break every other.

The page selection box accepts a comma-separated list of individual pages and ranges, using the same 1-based numbering you see in your PDF reader. "3" rotates only the third page; "1-4,9" rotates the first four and the ninth; leaving it blank rotates everything. Pages outside the document are rejected with a message telling you how many pages it actually has, rather than being silently ignored.

Rotations accumulate correctly

If a page already carries a rotation — many scans do — slimdocs adds yours to it rather than replacing it. A page already at 90° that you turn another 90° ends up at 180°, which is what you would expect from turning a sheet of paper twice.

The result is always normalised into the range a PDF reader expects, so a document that has been rotated several times over its life never ends up with a strange accumulated value that some viewers handle differently from others.

When a rotation will not fix it

Rotation works in right angles. If a scan is skewed by a few degrees because the paper went through the feeder crooked, no amount of rotating will straighten it — that needs deskewing, which resamples the page image and is a different operation entirely.

Similarly, if a page looks upside down only when printed but correct on screen, the issue is usually the printer's duplex setting rather than the PDF. It is worth checking that before changing the file.