How it works : Reorder a PDF
The tool shows the angle of EVERY page before acting, then reads back the angles of the file it produced. Rotating a page touches no pixel: a display angle changes, so it is lossless.
Both chores come from the same place: a scanner. Pages lying on their side because the sheet went in the wrong way round, and pages out of order because a sheet feeder scanned the backs on the way back up. It is always noticed afterwards, at the moment of sending.
Rotating a page in a PDF redraws nothing. Every page carries a display angle, and the reader applies that angle: changing it is therefore a LOSSLESS operation, reversible, which touches no pixel and recompresses no image. That is the difference with an image, where turning means re-encoding.
The classic mistake is treating every page the same. A scanned document often has some pages already rotated by 90 degrees and others upright: applying the same quarter turn to all of them lays half of them down. So the tool shows the starting angle of every page, adds your quarter turn to whatever is already there, and READS BACK the angles of the produced file to show you them.
How it works
- Drop your PDF in. The tool lists your pages with each one's angle: upright, or already rotated, and by how much.
- Choose the order (keep it, reverse it, or dictate it as a range), then the quarter turn to apply and to which pages.
- Click. The file arrives, and the tool reads back the angles of the produced document to show you the result page by page.
Formats accepted
PDFs only. To turn an image, the “Crop, rotate, flip” tool in the image corner handles it, and there the pixels really do have to be re-encoded.
PDF document
Pages are copied as they are, with their fonts, their images and their dimensions. Only the display angle and the order change: no image is recompressed.
Its limits
Rotation is a display angle, not a transformation of the pixels
That is good news, and it needs understanding: a reader that ignored the angle would show the page on its side. Every serious reader has applied it for a very long time, and printing follows the angle. But if you later extract an image from that page with a tool that does not read the angle, it will come out in its original orientation.
The quarter turn ADDS to the existing angle
A page already rotated by 90 degrees, asked for a quarter turn, ends up at 180, not at 90. That is the behaviour you expect when you look at your document and want it upright, and it is why the starting angle of every page is shown before the act.
Beyond thirty pages the displayed list is truncated
On a two-hundred-page document, a two-hundred-line list would drown the information instead of giving it. The processing does cover every page: only the on-screen list stops at thirty, and it says so.
80 MB
The document is opened entirely in memory, and its reordered version lives beside it. That is the honest limit of a tab on a modest device.
A password-protected PDF will not open here
It has to be unlocked first, which needs its password. The “Password-protect a PDF” tool in the same corner can do that.
Questions about this tool
Is my document sent anywhere?
No, and you can check in ten seconds. Open the inspector with the F12 key, “Network” tab, clear the list, then drop the document in and reorder it. Not a single line appears. Cut your connection and do it again: the tool behaves the same.
Does turning a page damage the document?
No, and this is specific to PDF. Every page carries a display angle that the reader applies: changing that angle redraws nothing, recompresses no image, and undoes just as easily. On an image, turning means re-encoding the pixels, and there you do lose something. Here, you do not.
Why does the rotation add instead of replacing?
Because that is what you want when you are looking at your document. You see a page on its side, you ask for a quarter turn, you expect it to come upright: that means starting from its current angle. If the tool replaced the angle, a page already lying down would stay lying down. It is also why the list shows every page's starting angle.
My scanner scanned the backs upside down, every other page.
That is the most frequent case, and two settings fix it: ask for a half turn, and enter “2, 4, 6-” as the pages concerned. The odd ones stay upright, the even ones flip. If the backs also arrived in reverse order, do the flip first, then run the resulting file through again in “dictate the order” mode.
Can I delete a page here?
Indirectly: in “dictate the order” mode, a page you do not name is not in the file you get. But if your need is to remove pages, the “Split a PDF or pull pages out of it” tool in the same corner is made for that, and its “remove the pages named” mode takes less thinking.
Does the produced document keep my name?
No: the identity card of the file you get is empty, as with every structural tool in this corner. Metadata attached to a PAGE does follow the page, though, since the page is copied as it is. The “Clean a PDF's metadata” tool in the same corner shows and removes those.
Going further
The tool shows the angle of EVERY page before acting, then reads back the angles of the file it produced. Rotating a page touches no pixel: a display angle changes, so it is lossless.
VerifyThe proof, step by stepThe network inspector check, explained one gesture at a time, with screenshots.
The cornerThe PDF cornerMerge, split, lock, fill, slim down. A PDF should never have to travel to a stranger to be cut in two.