Flip It Around — How to Mirror and Rotate PDF Pages.

It can be frustrating when you open a PDF file, only to discover pages have been scanned and saved in reverse, or you’ve got landscape pages with text reading sideways. There are also times when you want to change the direction of a page on purpose. There’s no need to be a contortionist, flip your screen upside down, or hold up an actual mirror. You can easily manipulate the way PDF pages face. Read on to learn how.

What you’ll learn

• What mirrored pages are and how to prevent them
• Landscape and portrait orientation in PDF files
• How to turn PDF pages around
• Troubleshooting PDF page manipulation
• More options for manipulating PDF pages

What mirrored PDF pages are and how to prevent them.

A mirrored page or a mirrored image looks just like you do when you look in a mirror and see yourself in reverse. In a document, the text or images are flipped horizontally. The page or image appears reversed, from left to right.

• Desktop scanning to PDF.
  Mirrored pages usually hajppen simply because a document has been scanned upside down or facing in the wrong direction. This can easily happen when scanning documents on unfamiliar equipment or scanning in a hurry.
  
  To ensure the paper documents you scan to PDF are facing the right way, follow the paper placement guides on your scanner. They will have guidance and markers beside the glass and on feeder trays to show you how to correctly align and position different paper sizes, such as A4 and A3 when you’re scanning and copying.

• Mobile scanning to PDF.

Landscape and portrait page orientations in PDFs.

Sometimes you’ll have a PDF file that contains text on both portrait and landscape pages. For example, it’s common in documents such as financial and research papers to include tables that summarize data that fit best on a landscape page, but the body of the main text is portrait.

You can reorient individual pages in PDFs. Flip PDF pages so that when you’re viewing them on screen the text is all seen the right way up when you’re going from a portrait to a landscape page and back again.

How to turn PDF pages around.

It’s a simple process to mirror PDF pages and rotate them in your documents. It’s also the same process to flip PDF pages from portrait to landscape and landscape to portrait. Any pages that may have been scanned upside down or inserted the wrong way around are easily fixed. You can do it in a downloaded Adobe Acrobat application or with Adobe Acrobat Online web-based tools.

• Rotate PDF pages online.
  • Follow this link to rotate PDF pages online.
  • Drag and drop or upload your PDF file.
  • Select the page(s) you want to rotate.
  • Click on the circular arrow buttons to rotate your pages left or right. anticlockwise.
    
  • Click save.
  • Download your newly rotated file.
  • To edit a PDF further, sign in with your email, Adobe ID, Google, Apple, or Facebook accounts.

• Rotate PDF pages in Adobe Acrobat.
  • Open your PDF in your Adobe Acrobat application.
  • From the Tools menu, select “Edit a PDF”.
  • Select the page(s) you want to rotate.
  • Click on the “Organize pages” option.
  • Click on the circular arrow buttons to rotate your pages left or right.
    
• Rotate PDF pages in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  You can rotate page views in PDFs with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. When you rotate the page view in Acrobat Reader, you’re not able to make any changes that you can save in the document itself. It’s a great solution if you’ve got a PDF that you need to read but cannot make pages due to security permissions previously set by others.
  • Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  • Select “View” and then “Rotate View”.
  • Select “Clockwise” or “Counterclockwise” to rotate in 90-degree increments.

Tips for PDF page manipulation.

Most of the time, rotating and flipping PDF pages is a very straightforward process. If you’re not getting the results you expect, here are some tips for troubleshooting —

• Document permissions.
  PDF security settings include the capacity to set limits on what others can do in them. To check whether you have permission to edit a PDF and manipulate pages, go to the Menu, then Protection > Security Properties. The Document Restrictions Summary lists what you will be able to do with your PDF file.

• Inverted or reversed text.
  If the text in your PDF file appears inverted or reversed after flipping or rotating, it may be due to the original document being saved as an image instead of a text-based PDF. To fix this issue, try using the Scan & OCR tool in Adobe Acrobat to convert the image to text.

• Margins and layouts.
  Rotating pages can sometimes affect the consistency of page margins in a PDF document. To adjust the margins of your rotated PDF pages, simply use the Edit tool and go to the option for headers and footers to change the measurements of the page margins.

More options for manipulating PDF pages.

There’s a lot more you can do to manipulate PDF pages online with Adobe Acrobat and in a downloaded Adobe Acrobat application. You can, for example —

• Merge PDFs
• Split PDFs
• Extract PDF pages
• Delete PDF pages
• Rearrange PDF pages
• Add page numbers to a PDF
• and more.

Related content

Some of our other articles to help with scanning documents to PDF, and protecting your files once you’ve formatted them, include —

• How to scan receipts to PDF
• How to Scan Multiple Pages into One PDF
• Protect Your Content – How to Create a Read-only PDF