How to Rotate, Reorder or Delete PDF Pages

Everything to do with whole pages lives in the pages panel: the thumbnail strip you open with the panel button in the toolbar (the first button in the group after the zoom controls). From there you can rotate a sideways scan, drag pages into a new order, delete the ones you do not need, duplicate a page, or slot in a blank one. Every operation is undoable with Ctrl+Z.

Rotate pages

1. Open the pages panel. Thumbnails show every page in order; the current page is outlined.
2. Rotate one page. Hover a thumbnail and click its rotate icon; each click turns the page 90° clockwise. Or select the page and click Rotate at the top of the panel.
3. Rotate several pages. Tick their check boxes, then click Rotate. The button label tells you how many pages it will affect.
4. Rotate every page. Click Rotate all. Useful for a whole scan that came out sideways.
5. Download. The rotation is written into the PDF, so every viewer shows the pages the right way up.

Reorder pages

Drag a thumbnail up or down and drop it where it belongs. On a touch screen, or for precise moves, use the Move up and Move down arrows that appear under each thumbnail. To move a block of pages, tick them first; they move together.

Delete pages

Hover a thumbnail and click the bin icon, or tick several pages and click Delete. A document always keeps at least one page. Deleted pages can be brought back with undo until you close the file.

Duplicate a page, insert a blank page

Duplicate makes a copy of the selected page right after the original, annotations included, which is handy for a template page you need to fill in several times. Blank page inserts an empty US Letter-sized page after the current one; you can then type on it, place an image on it, or use it as a separator.

Tips

• Select all with the check-box control at the top of the panel, then untick the few pages you want to keep out of an operation.
• One page at a time. The toolbar button next to the pages button switches between continuous scrolling and single-page view, which makes it easier to check each page after rotating.
• Sideways text on only part of a page cannot be fixed by rotating; that is a layout issue in the original document.
• Extract instead of delete. If you need both the full document and a shortened copy, keep the original and extract the pages you want into a new file; see splitting and extracting.

Frequently asked

Does rotating a page lower its quality?

No. Rotation is stored as a page attribute; the content is untouched.

Can I rotate by 45°?

Pages rotate in 90° steps, which is what PDF supports. Images you insert can be rotated to any angle.

Can I move pages between two different PDFs?

Yes: open the first, use Merge PDF in the pages panel to add the second, then arrange and delete as needed; see merging PDFs.