Why Scanned and Phone-Captured PDFs Come Out Sideways
A PDF page carries a rotation attribute separate from its actual content. Document scanners set it from the direction paper went through the feeder, and phone-camera apps set it from the device's accelerometer at the moment of capture — which is why a page can look upright in one viewer and sideways in another. The problem surfaces at the worst moment: you email the file or send it to print, and the recipient gets pages lying on their side. Re-scanning is slow, and rotating inside a viewer usually only changes how that one app displays it, not how the file is stored.
This tool fixes the stored orientation itself, so the correction travels with the document everywhere it goes — every viewer, every printer, every device shows it the right way up.
How Permanent, Lossless Rotation Works
When you choose an angle, the open-source pdf-lib library updates each page's rotation attribute by 90, 180 or 270 degrees and re-serializes the document into a fresh file. Crucially, nothing is re-rendered or re-compressed: the text stays selectable and searchable, vector graphics stay razor-sharp, and embedded images are untouched. It is a true lossless transform — the only thing that changes is which way the page faces.
You can rotate every page at once, or type a range such as 2, 4-6 to fix only the pages that came in wrong. The whole operation happens in your browser's memory; the original file on your disk is never modified, and nothing is uploaded.
Common Rotation Fixes
Two patterns cover almost everything. To fix a single landscape scan sitting inside an otherwise upright document, enter just that page number and a 90-degree turn. To correct a whole batch that came off the scanner rotated, leave the range empty so every page turns together. If a page is upside down — common with duplex scanners — choose 180 degrees. Need continuous page numbers afterwards on the corrected file? Run it through the Add Page Numbers tool when you're done.