How to rotate, delete and reorder pages in PDF by Zaweba
Rotate, delete, move and reverse pages from the Pages menu or thumbnails in PDF by Zaweba, and pick odd, even, landscape or portrait pages in one go.
Pages arrive in the wrong state all the time. A scanner feeds a stack in upside down, a merged document has a blank page in the middle, a report needs its appendix moved before the conclusion. PDF by Zaweba puts the everyday page fixes in one place, the Pages menu, so tidying a document takes seconds rather than a trip to another program.
Where the commands are
The Pages menu holds them, and the same commands are on the right-click menu of the page thumbnails and in the command palette. They act on the thumbnails you have chosen, or on the current page if you haven't chosen any. So you can fix the page in front of you directly, or select several thumbnails and fix them all at once.
Rotating
Ctrl+R rotates the chosen pages, and Ctrl+Shift+R turns them 180 degrees. The half turn is the one for scans fed in upside down. Rotating here changes the pages in the file, so the fix travels with the document. That is different from rotate view in the View menu, which only turns the display for you.
Deleting, moving and reversing
Delete removes the chosen pages, ideal for blank pages, duplicated cover sheets or a page that shouldn't have been included.
Move gives you three choices: earlier, later or to a page number. Earlier and later nudge a page one place at a time, good for small fixes. Moving to a page number is quicker for long jumps, such as taking an appendix from the end of a two hundred page document to just after the contents.
Reverse turns the order of the chosen pages round. It is the fix for a stack that was scanned last page first, which happens with many scanners that output pages face up.
Choosing pages quickly
Pages > Select pages picks pages for you. Give it a list, or ask for odd pages, even pages, landscape pages or portrait pages. Then any command acts on the selection.
This is a great time saver. Scanned a double-sided document and every back page came out upside down? Select even pages and turn them 180 degrees in one go. Need to turn every landscape page to portrait for printing? Select landscape and rotate. A long document that would take dozens of clicks becomes two steps.
Safe to experiment
Each change is one undoable step. Delete the wrong page and Ctrl+Z brings it back. Move something to the wrong place and undo puts it where it was. That makes page work low risk, even on a long document.
Some PDFs are made with page changes turned off by their owner. When that is the case, the commands say so rather than failing silently, so you know why nothing happened.
Fitting it together
Page work goes hand in hand with the thumbnails, where you can see the shape of the whole document, and with the other page tools in PDF by Zaweba for inserting, duplicating, extracting and splitting pages. A typical tidy up runs like this: delete the blanks, rotate the sideways pages, move the stray section into place, check the thumbnails from start to end, then save.
A few minutes with these commands turns a messy scan or a hastily merged file into a document that reads in order and the right way up.
