Rotate PDF

Turn some or all of a PDF's pages a quarter or a half turn — the usual fix for a scan that came out sideways. The rotating happens in this browser, on this computer: the file is not uploaded, because burrow has no server that could receive it.

This tool needs JavaScript

The rotating is done by code running in your browser, so with JavaScript switched off there is nothing to do the work. There is no server-side version to fall back to — that is the whole design, not a missing feature.

With JavaScript on, this page lets you choose a PDF, pick which pages to turn and which way, and download the result. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Choosing pages by number

You can turn every page, or type the ones you want: 3, or 2-5, or 1, 4, 7-9. burrow shows how many pages the document has once it has opened it.

There are no page pictures yet. Choosing pages here means knowing their numbers, which is harder than pointing at a thumbnail, and it is a real limitation rather than an oversight — showing pages means rendering them, and rendering a long document needs a memory ceiling burrow does not have yet. It is being built; until it is, this page does not pretend to offer it.

What happens to large files

Everything is held in this browser tab's memory, so the practical limit is what your device can spare rather than an upload size. burrow refuses a file larger than 512 MB before it opens it, and a document of more than 10,000 pages before it turns any of them — so an oversized job is refused rather than failing part way through and leaving you with something incomplete.

What that does not save you from, said here rather than discovered: a very large document that is under both limits can still make the tab slow while it runs, and on a phone the browser may stop the tab entirely. That is the device's memory ceiling, reached inside the PDF engine where nothing can intervene.

What is kept, and what is not

Everything. Rotating changes one attribute on the pages you chose and touches nothing else: bookmarks, attachments, form fields, annotations and the page contents all come through unchanged. The pages themselves are not re-encoded, so a scan is not resampled and a photograph does not lose quality — the document simply records that those pages display turned.

That is worth stating plainly because the other tools here cannot say it. Merging keeps bookmarks from the first file only; a tool that takes pages out of a document has to drop what pointed at the pages it left behind. Rotating drops nothing, and burrow's tests check the claim rather than assuming it: every bookmark, annotation, form field and attachment the document carried must still be there afterwards, and each page's drawing instructions must come through unaltered.

A file that is encrypted, damaged, or not a PDF is refused. So is one where a page you asked to turn already carries a rotation that is not a whole number of quarter turns — burrow will not guess at what was meant, because guessing would turn a page on a value the file never carried. A page you did not ask for is never read, so a document can carry an odd rotation elsewhere and still be usable here.