Fix sideways or upside-down scans and save a permanently rotated PDF.
Turning a page in a PDF viewer often only changes how it looks on screen — reopen the file and it's sideways again. meldpdf writes the rotation into the document itself, so the pages stay the right way up everywhere: in email previews, on other devices, and when printed.
The tool currently rotates all pages together. To rotate just a few, first extract those pages, rotate them, then merge them back in.
No. Rotation only changes page orientation metadata; text and images are untouched.
No. Everything happens locally in your browser. See our privacy policy.
A PDF page has a /Rotate entry in its page dictionary — a number that tells the viewer how many degrees clockwise to turn the content before displaying it. When you rotate a page with this tool, it updates that value (0, 90, 180, or 270). The actual page content — text, images, vector paths — is not redrawn or re-encoded. This is why rotation is lossless and nearly instant regardless of file size: the tool changes a single number per page rather than re-rendering pixels. It also means the file size stays virtually the same after rotation.
Rotation fixes orientation — it turns a sideways page upright. It does not fix a page that was placed crookedly on the scanner glass (a slight diagonal skew). If your scan is tilted by a few degrees, rotation in 90-degree increments will not help. In that case you need deskew software, or simply re-scan the page with the paper aligned properly. Use rotation when the page is exactly 90, 180, or 270 degrees off from where it should be — which covers the vast majority of scanner and phone-camera orientation mistakes.
A permanently rotated PDF prints in its corrected orientation on every printer and operating system. This matters because some printers ignore the rotation flag when it is only set as a "view" preference in a reader app. By writing the rotation into the file itself, meldpdf ensures the printed output matches what you see on screen. If you are preparing a document for double-sided printing, make sure all pages face the same way first — a single upside-down page in the middle will flip on paper too.
No. The PDF specification only supports rotation in 90-degree increments (0, 90, 180, 270). Arbitrary-angle rotation would require re-rendering every element on the page into a new coordinate space, which is a fundamentally different operation. If you need a slight angle correction (deskewing), image-editing or OCR software is the right tool.
No. Because rotation changes metadata rather than content, selectable text stays selectable and searchable text stays searchable. Copy-paste, find-in-page, and screen readers all work exactly as before.
Last updated: 3 September 2026.