Rotate or delete PDF pages

Scanners are the usual culprit: automatic orientation detection misreads one page in a stack of fifty, and the result is a document where every third page lies on its side. Phone-scanning apps cause a similar problem by storing the camera's orientation as a rotation flag that some readers honor and others ignore — your file looks fine in your viewer and sideways in the recipient's.

Select the affected pages in the thumbnail grid and rotate in 90-degree steps until orientation is correct. Click again for 180° or 270°. The rotation is written into the page definitions, so every PDF reader renders the same result — and because only orientation changes, text stays vector-crisp and file size is unaffected. Work from the thumbnails rather than memory: it is easy to over-rotate one page while fixing another, and the visual grid exposes that before you export.

Scanned stacks accumulate pages that should not ship: blank separator sheets, staple shadows, upside-down covers, and the "page intentionally left blank" notices printed into contracts. Mark them for deletion in the same pass as your rotation work — both actions apply in one step, so cleanup is a single operation rather than two round trips.

Before deleting, check whether the page carries anything structural: a table of contents entry pointing at it, a signature page disguised as a form, or a numbered exhibit that other pages reference. Page numbers in the remaining document will not renumber themselves, so documents with printed folios should have those checked after removal.

Not every sideways page is an error. Reports that pair portrait text with landscape data sheets are working as designed, and forcing uniform orientation can make tables illegibly small. The test is whether a reader could consume the document linearly without rotating their device — if pages flip direction for no content reason, fix them; if a wide table genuinely needs the width, leave it.

Print changes the calculation: a landscape page forced onto portrait paper scales down to fit and often becomes unreadable. For documents bound for paper, pre-rotate landscape pages to portrait or print those sections as their own run — a one-page test print is cheaper than a ruined batch.