Rotate a PDF and save it so the fix sticks

Chrome's and Edge's built-in PDF viewers, and most phone viewers, have a rotate control that only changes how the page is drawn in that window. Close the tab and the setting is gone. Some desktop apps do write the turn into the file when you save, macOS Preview among them, but plenty of free readers offer no save at all, and a file you pass on may land in one of those.

A PDF page carries its own rotation value, and readers honor it when they draw the page. Rotate PDF changes that value and saves a new file. No page content is redrawn: text stays selectable and searchable, and images are not re-encoded, so nothing loses quality. The file is written out fresh by the save step, so its size can shift slightly in either direction, but never because something inside was recompressed. Printing follows the stored rotation too, so the fix carries through to paper.

Under "How far?" you pick one of three cards: "Quarter turn right" (90 degrees clockwise), "Upside down" (180 degrees) or "Quarter turn left" (90 degrees anticlockwise). "Quarter turn right" is the one already selected. Decide the direction in your own viewer first: if the top of the text points at the left edge of the screen the page needs a turn right, and if it points at the right edge it needs a turn left.

Rotate PDF shows the file name and your options, not page thumbnails, so you cannot check the result until you download it. Work out the direction and the page list before you run it.

Under "Rotate" the default is "All pages". If only some pages are wrong, choose "Chosen pages" and type them the way you would for a printer: 3, 7-9, last. Page numbers count from 1, commas and hyphens both work, and "last" means the final page. A number outside the document is rejected with a message naming how many pages the file has, and the "Rotate pages" button stays disabled until the list makes sense.

Scans from a document feeder often come out with some pages landscape and some upside down. Rotate PDF applies one turn to every page you list, so a mixed file needs a run for each direction: "Chosen pages" for the sideways ones, then a second pass for the upside-down ones.

The second pass has to start from the file the first pass produced. Download it, click "Start over", and drop the downloaded -rotated.pdf back on the box. The name gains another "-rotated" each time, which is a rough way of keeping track of which copy is which.

If nearly every page needs its own fix, Organize PDF is quicker. It renders a thumbnail grid, and each thumbnail has its own rotate left and rotate right buttons that turn the preview as you click, so you can correct pages by eye and save the lot in one download.

Rotation is relative to how the page sits now, which the tool says under the options too. A page already stored with a quarter turn, then given another quarter turn the same way, ends up upside down. If you rotate a file twice by mistake, run it once more with the opposite quarter turn to get back.

Your original is never touched. The download is the source name with "-rotated" added, so "invoice.pdf" comes back as "invoice-rotated.pdf", and moving it over the old file is your job.

A PDF that needs a password to open cannot be read at all: the tool says so and points you at Unlock PDF, which needs the password you already know. Files go up to 100 MB, one document per run, and everything happens on your device. Past about 50 MB you get a warning that the file is held entirely in memory and may struggle on a phone, which is worth heeding before you queue up a long scan.