Guide · OtterPDF

Rotate PDF pages the right way up

A scanner fed a page in sideways, or a landscape chart sits in a portrait report. Most viewers let you rotate the view, then forget it the moment you close the file. This fixes the file.

Open OtterPDF →

Rotate one page

Open pdf.ottercraft.dev and add your PDF.
Find the page in the thumbnails and press its rotate button. Each press turns it 90° clockwise, so press three times for 90° the other way. The thumbnail updates so you can see when it's right.
Press Download. The saved file has the page rotated for good.

Rotate several pages at once

Tick the box on each page that needs turning, or Select all if the whole document is sideways.
Press Rotate above the list. All ticked pages turn together.
Download.

Why it sticks

A PDF page has a rotation attribute stored in the file. "Rotate view" in a viewer only changes what's on screen and leaves that attribute alone, which is why the page is sideways again next time. OtterPDF writes the new rotation into the page when it builds your file, so every viewer shows it the right way up: your phone, a browser, the print shop's software. The page content isn't re-encoded, so nothing loses quality and the file doesn't get bigger.

Combining it with other edits

Rotation is one of several things you can do before downloading. In the same session you can reorder pages, delete the ones you don't need, add pages from another PDF, or export only some pages. It's all applied together when you press Download.

Things worth knowing

Rotation is in 90° steps. Straightening a scan that's a few degrees off is a different job (deskewing), and a scanner app does it better.
Everything happens on your device. The file is read and rewritten by code in your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded.
After the first visit, OtterPDF also works offline.