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Use case · 3 minutes

How to rotate and straighten a scanned PDF

Fix sideways or upside-down scans and trim the messy edges — in your browser, nothing uploaded.

For: Anyone with sideways, upside-down, or untidy scans from a scanner or phone
Start with step 1 Browse all tools
STEP BY STEP

The workflow

1
Rotate pages to the right orientation
Open Rotate, turn pages 90°, 180°, or 270° until they read upright. You can rotate every page at once or just the few that came in sideways.
Open Rotate PDF
2
Crop away the scanner margins
Scans often carry a black border or a strip of the platen. Crop trims each page to the document edge so the result looks clean on screen and in print.
Open Crop PDF
3
Compress the cleaned-up file (optional)
Image-heavy scans are large. Run Compress to get the tidied PDF under a mailbox or upload-portal limit without a visible quality drop.
Open Compress PDF
WHY IT MATTERS

The case for doing this

A scan that opens sideways is the small annoyance that makes a document look unprofessional and forces every reader to crane their neck or rotate it in their own viewer. Fixing it once, at the source, saves everyone that friction. Rotate corrects 90° orientation problems (the common case when a page goes through the feeder the wrong way), and Crop removes the dark scanner border so the page is just the document. Note the honest limit: Rotate works in 90° steps — it squares up a sideways page, but it doesn't deskew a page scanned at a slight 2° tilt; for that you'd re-scan straight. Because Rotate, Crop, and Compress all run in your browser, sensitive scans — IDs, contracts, statements — never leave your device.

COMMON MISTAKES

What to avoid

Rotating the whole file when only some pages are wrong
Mixed-orientation scans are common. Rotate the specific pages that are sideways rather than spinning every page, or you'll just move the problem around.
Expecting Rotate to fix a slight tilt
Rotate turns in 90° steps. A page scanned at a small angle needs re-scanning straight — there's no pixel-level deskew here.
TIPS FOR THE BEST RESULTS

What works

Crop after rotating, not before
Rotate first so the page is upright, then crop — otherwise the crop box is oriented to the wrong edges.
Keep the original until you're happy
Rotate and crop write a new file; keep the source scan until you've confirmed the cleaned-up version reads correctly end to end.
RELATED WORKFLOWS

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FAQ

Questions about this workflow

No. Rotation re-orients the existing page content without re-encoding it, so the pages are identical to the source, just turned.

Try the workflow on a real PDF

Free tools run in your browser. No signup, no watermarks.

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