Rotate 2 sideways pages in a 50-page scan, leave the rest alone

Rotate just the sideways pages, step by step

Take a 50-page scanned contract where pages 14 and 37 are landscape tables that came out sideways.

1. Find the page numbers. Flip through the file in any viewer and note them: 14 and 37.
2. Drop the PDF on Rotate PDF above.
3. Under Turn, choose the direction (the next section shows how to tell).
4. Under Pages, choose Some, and type 14, 37 in the box. Ranges work too: 14-16, 37.
5. Press Rotate and download the result, named like contract-rotated.pdf.

The result line says “Turned 2 pages by 90 degrees” and “A true rotation: nothing re-rendered, text stays text”. If the 2 pages need different turns (1 left, 1 right), run the tool twice, once per direction, on the file from the first run.

Clockwise or anticlockwise: which way to turn?

Look at the sideways page and find the top of the text, the edge where the heading is.

• The top points left (you tilt your head left to read it): choose 90° right, a quarter turn clockwise.
• The top points right: choose 90° left.
• The page is upside down: choose 180°.

Got it wrong? Run the file through again with 90° right or 90° left. Turns add up to what the page already has, so 2 wrong quarter turns become 1 correct half turn; nothing is lost along the way.

Not sure of the page numbers? Use thumbnails

Rotate PDF works from page numbers and shows no previews. For a scan where you would rather see the pages, open it in the editor: the page rail shows every page as a thumbnail, so the sideways ones stand out.

Edit PDFReal text editing, objects, annotations, forms. Free, runs on your device.Open

1. Open the PDF in the editor.
2. On a sideways thumbnail, open its menu and choose Turn right or Turn left. Repeat for each page.
3. Press Save for a new file with the pages turned.

Each turn undoes like any other change. Organise PDF has a Turn button on every row too (a quarter turn clockwise per click), handy when you are also moving pages; it keeps the bookmarks, links and form fields as well.

Save it so it sticks

In most PDF viewers, the rotate button turns your view, not the file: close it and the page is sideways again. Rotate PDF does the other thing. It writes the turn into the page’s rotation entry, the setting every PDF viewer reads, and gives you a new file. Open that file in a different viewer from the one you used: if the page is upright there too, the fix is in the file. The guide to rotations that will not save goes deeper. If the sideways pages are phone photos, the guide to sideways photos in a PDF explains why they turned and how to stop it next time.

Because only that entry changes, nothing is redrawn. Our 1-page scan went from 34,836 bytes to 34,779; the picture inside is byte for byte the same. Bookmarks, links, form fields and the file’s metadata stay as they were.

Whole file, or every other page

• Everything is sideways: Pages, All, then the turn.
• Every other page is upside down (a double-sided stack fed so the backs came out inverted): Pages, Even, 180°. Odd does the other half.
• Many files with the same problem: drop them all at once; each gets the same turn and comes back as its own file.

What rotating cannot fix

Rotation works in quarter turns. A page scanned 2 degrees crooked stays 2 degrees crooked after any rotation, because rotating does not straighten (deskew) a scan; rescanning with the page against the feeder’s guide does.

Rotating does not make a scan searchable either. A scanned page is a picture; turned upright it is still a picture, and you cannot select or search its text until you run OCR. Rotate first, then OCR, so the text is read the right way up; the searchable scans guide walks through it. And when the pages are fine but in the wrong order, that is a different fix: reverse the page order.