Scanned pages that come out sideways or upside down are one of the most common PDF annoyances. PDF Arranger rotates pages in 90-degree steps, and because you can see every page as a thumbnail, you can fix exactly the pages that are wrong — one page, a chapter, or every odd page in a scan — and leave the rest alone.
Rotation here is a page-level fix: it turns the whole page, including everything on it. It does not straighten slightly skewed scans by a few degrees; heavily tilted scans are better re-scanned or deskewed with a scanning tool first.
Before you start
You need PDF Arranger 1.14.0 (or a recent version) installed. If it is not on your computer yet, download PDF Arranger first — it is free, open source (GPL-3.0), and works entirely offline, so your files never leave your computer.
Nothing you do in PDF Arranger changes the original file on disk. Every edit only takes effect when you export the result to a new PDF, which makes experimenting safe: if the output is not what you wanted, adjust the arrangement and export again.
Step by step: rotate pages
- Open the PDF and scroll to the page that is facing the wrong way.
- Select the page. For a single fix, one click is enough. For a batch fix, extend the selection first (see the selection tools below).
- Apply a 90-degree rotation in the direction needed, using the rotate actions for the selected pages. Apply it again if the page needs 180 or 270 degrees in total.
- Repeat the selection and rotation for any other wrongly oriented pages, choosing the direction per group — landscape pages in a portrait document may need the opposite turn.
- Export the document. The new PDF keeps the corrected orientation permanently, in any viewer.
Selecting pages for batch rotation
PDF Arranger’s page selection tools are what make batch rotation quick. Beyond clicking and shift-selecting a continuous run, you can select all odd pages, all even pages, pages from the same file, pages of the same format (size), a page range, or invert the current selection. A typical use: a book scanned two sides at a time where every even page is upside down — select all even pages, rotate twice, done.
Tips
- Check a rotated page at full zoom before exporting; text that reads correctly as a thumbnail occasionally turns out to belong to a deliberately landscape table or chart.
- Rotation is lossless for the page content — you are changing orientation, not re-encoding the page.
- If only some pages of a scan are rotated, the problem is usually the scanner’s auto-rotate setting; fixing it there prevents the issue next time.
A worked example
A common case: a 40-page scan where the even pages are all upside down because the scanner’s feeder flipped every second sheet. Rotating forty pages one by one would take ages, but the pattern does the work for you. Select all even pages with the selection tools, apply a 90-degree rotation twice (180 degrees in total), and every flipped page comes right in a single operation. Then export and spot-check three or four pages, including the first and last even pages, at reading size. If a document instead has one sideways table in the middle, the same workflow shrinks to selecting that single page and rotating it once.
Related guides
Keep going with these step-by-step guides from the same series: