How to Save a Rotated Adobe Pdf File
I Received an Adobe Pdf Scan of a Document That Displays Upside-Down. I Rotated It Inside Adobe Acrobat and Chose Save as to Make a New Document, However, the...
I received an Adobe PDF scan of a document that displays upside-down.
I rotated it inside Adobe Acrobat and chose Save As to make a new document, however, the rotation is not saved and when I open the new document, it is upside-down again.
How can I correct this upside-down document as a new PDF file?
16 Answers
If you have Adobe Acrobat (NOT Adobe Acrobat Reader) then make sure you go to Documents ⇨ Rotate Pages and then save it. This should work if you close and reopen. If you go to View ⇨ Rotate View and try to save the document it will not keep the rotated view when you save it.
For Adobe Acrobat 10, go to Tools on the right and rotate it that way, then save it.
Follow these steps:
- Rotate to the correct view
- Select: File -> Print -> Printer: PDF Printer
- Save as your document
Voila!
While there are many commercial tools available which allow you to modify/rotate a PDF document and save the changes, you have to download and install the software -- too much of a hassle for a one-off kinda task such as this. Luckily, the fine folks at allow you to have your PDF file rotated online to a desired degree (90 clockwise/counterclockwise and 180 clockwise) online, for free.
I just had this issue today and found the website. Once you specify the PDF you want to rotate and the degree of rotation, you click the "Rotate PDF" button. That uploads your PDF to thier servers and performs the requested rotation. Momentarily, you're greeted with a result page allowing you to view the result online or download the rotated PDF to your computer.
While they say they remove the PDF after conversion and don't retain it on their servers, I'd not upload a sensitive document for conversion.
ImageMagick's convert tool can be given -flip -flop to reflect in both axes, which will do a 180° rotate.
You may want to use the -density option to keep a decent resolution (as pointed out in the comments, the default 70 dpi looks ugly. 300 or 600 dpi give better results)
Another solution for automating this is to use pdftk (which unlike Imagemagick's convert, won't change the resolution). It can be done with the command
pdftk inputfilename.pdf cat 1-endsouth output outputfilename.pdf
where cat instructs pdftk to catenate pages (as opposed to burst mode where you get a lot of little files) 1-end is the page range and south is the direction to rotate it (top points south)
Also, here are some additional examples of pdftk usage.
You can open the PDF file in an Adobe app like Illustrator and then rotate in there. Then save as PDF and this should work. If you you don't have access to CS3 you may want to try open source PDF editing software.
: open source, cross-platform tool that allows to rotate, split, merge and otherwise manipulate PDF documents. This is a must-have tool, in my opinion, if you are doing things like insurance claims, or other document handling tasks.
I used this because the other solutions (above) didn't work for me in my firewall-limited environment (we're not allowed to upload documents to the web).
- Download & Install from Github releases
- Note: I had to install the MSI version
- Run and Click the "Rotate" button
- Click "Add", and select a PDF document
- Under "Rotate Settings" select the type of rotation you want done (you can rotate the whole doc, or only certain pages, etc.)
- Be sure to select a "Destination Directory"
- Click "Run"
DerfK's answer suggests pdftk, which is a good fit but isn't provided in Fedora since at least Fedora 21.
pdf-stapler
An alternative (actually listed in Fedora 23 when searching for a pdftk package) is pdf-stapler :
pdf-stapler cat input.pdf 1D output.pdf
will rotate by 180° (D) the first page (1) of input.pdf into output.pdf. See pdf-stapler -h.
Sarah Jenkins is a veteran tech journalist with over 12 years of experience covering artificial intelligence, mobile innovations, and digital ethics. Her insights have appeared in leading technology publications worldwide.
