How to Rotate PDF Pages (Fix Sideways Scans)
Scanned documents often come out sideways, especially when scanning a stack of mixed-orientation pages. Some PDFs export in landscape when they should be portrait. Fixing rotation is a one-click operation — and unlike re-scanning or re-exporting, it's lossless.
Why rotation is lossless
PDF rotation doesn't re-render the page or re-encode any images. It changes a single rotation angle metadata value on each page. Every PDF viewer reads that flag and displays the page accordingly. Image quality, text sharpness, and embedded fonts are completely unchanged.
90° vs 180° vs 270°
90° clockwise rotates a portrait page so it lies on its right side. 180° flips a page upside down — useful for documents scanned with the top edge facing the wrong way. 270° (or 90° counter-clockwise) rotates onto the left side, often the right choice for landscape documents that should be portrait.
Batch rotation
PDFPuddle accepts multiple PDFs at once and rotates them all by the same angle. Useful when you've scanned a batch of documents in the same orientation.
When you need per-page rotation
Currently PDFPuddle rotates all pages together. To rotate individual pages, split the PDF first using Split PDF, rotate each chunk, then merge them back together with Merge PDF.