How to rotate a page in a PDF and save it

Click the page's thumbnail in PDF by Zaweba, press Ctrl+R to turn it, and save the file. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+R turns it 180 degrees instead, which is the one you want for a page that was scanned upside down. Because the rotation is saved into the PDF, the page opens the right way up for anyone you send it to.

That's the part that catches people out in many viewers. Turning the view only changes how the page looks on your screen at that moment, and the next person to open the file sees it sideways again.

Rotating the page, not the view

PDF by Zaweba has both. Rotate view, in the View menu, turns how pages are shown to you without changing the document, which is handy for reading a wide table in a portrait report. The Pages menu rotation is the one that changes the document itself, and it's the one you save.

So if your aim is to fix the file, use Ctrl+R or the rotate command in the Pages menu, on the thumbnail right-click menu, or in the command palette (Ctrl+K).

One page or many

Rotation acts on the pages chosen in the thumbnails, or on the current page if none are chosen. Press F4 if the thumbnails panel isn't showing.

To turn a single page, click its thumbnail and press Ctrl+R. To turn several, Ctrl+click each one, or Shift+click to take a run of pages, then press Ctrl+R once. Pages > Select pages can pick all landscape or all portrait pages for you, so if a scanner laid every wide drawing on its side, you can choose them all and turn them together.

Each press of Ctrl+R is a quarter turn. Press it again to keep going round.

Saving the result

Once the pages look right, save. If you'd like to keep the original file as it was, use Save as and give the new one another name.

Every rotation is a single undo step, so Ctrl+Z puts back a turn you didn't mean. Revert to saved goes back to the file on disk if you'd like to start again.

When rotation won't work

A PDF can be made with permissions that stop pages being changed. If so, PDF by Zaweba tells you, rather than ignoring the key press. A document you own with a permissions password can be changed once you have that password.

Fixing a whole scanned document

Scans are where most sideways and upside-down pages come from, and they usually need more than one fix. The Organise pages grid (Ctrl+Shift+O) shows the whole document as a full-window grid with every page command, so you can see at a glance which pages are turned the wrong way, rotate them, delete blank ones and drag the rest into order, then press Esc to go back.

If the pages also have uneven white edges from the scanner bed, Pages > Remove white margins can trim them once they're the right way up.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows that works offline with no account, so scanned letters and forms get fixed without leaving your computer.