Organize guide
Rotate Sideways Scanned Pages in a PDF
Updated
Short answer: Use Rotate PDF to turn every page at once, or Organize PDF to rotate only the pages that are wrong, then download the fixed file.
Feeders and phone scanners regularly put landscape pages, receipts and the odd upside-down sheet into a PDF the wrong way round. Rotating them in your viewer only changes the view; saving them correctly fixes them for everyone you send the file to.
Step by step
Step 1: If every page is wrong the same way, open Rotate PDF and drop the file.
Open Rotate PDF(runs on your device)Step 2: Choose Right (90° clockwise), Upside down (180°) or Left (90° anticlockwise), and download.
Step 3: If only some pages are wrong, open Organize PDF instead.
Open Organize PDF(runs on your device)Step 4: Use the rotate button on each page that needs it; the previews show the result as you go.
Step 5: Download the corrected file and, if you're going to OCR it, do that now.
Open OCR PDF(runs on our server)
Why this works, and what to watch for
Rotation in a PDF is a setting on each page that tells readers to display it turned by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Rotate PDF and Organize PDF change that setting and save it into the file, so it's permanent and every reader, printer and upload portal sees the page the right way up. The page content isn't redrawn: a scan isn't re-compressed and text isn't touched, so there is no loss of quality.
Your viewer's rotate button usually only affects your current view and isn't saved, which is why a file can look fine to you and arrive sideways for someone else. Save a properly rotated copy before sending.
Which direction? If the top of the text points to the left, turn it Right (clockwise); if it points to the right, turn it Left. When a document has a mix, Organize PDF shows a preview of every page, so you can fix each by sight and also drag misplaced pages into order and delete blank ones in the same pass.
Do this before OCR or conversion. Text recognition works far better on upright text, and PDF to Word reads pages in their display orientation, so fixing rotation first gives better results downstream.
Both tools run in your browser, so your scans aren't uploaded, and they're free with no limit.