Reorder, rotate and delete pages in a PDF
Every page of the document is laid out as a grid you can drag. Push a page into a different position, turn one that came out of the scanner on its side, drop the ones you do not want, and then press save once at the end. Turning a page costs nothing and loses nothing, because it sets the angle the page already carries rather than drawing the page again as a picture.
Rearrange the pages of a PDF
Every page of the document is laid out below. Drag them into the order you want, turn the ones that came out of the scanner sideways, throw away the ones you do not need, and save what is left. The document is read and rewritten by this tab, so nothing here is uploaded.
Turning a page sets the angle the page carries rather than redrawing it, so a scan comes out the same size it went in and the text in a typed document stays selectable. The pages themselves are copied across, which means form fields and links pointing inside the document become the marks they draw, and the original title, author and dates do not carry over. A document with a password on it is refused rather than opened, one document stops at 50 MB, and the grid lays out up to 60 pages.
Organise PDF pages, step by step
- Drop the document inThe grid fills with a small picture of every page, numbered as they are in the file you started with, so you are always looking at the thing itself rather than at a list of page numbers you have to remember.
- Push the pages aroundDrag a page where you want it, or nudge it with the arrows underneath. The two curved arrows turn it a quarter at a time, and the cross leaves it out of the result. Nothing is decided until you save.
- Save what is leftOne press writes a new document with the pages in the order shown, at the angles shown, and without the ones you dropped. The file you opened is untouched and still sitting where it was.
Turning a page writes one number, and that is the whole difference from every other one
There is a value in every page of a PDF called Rotate, and a viewer reads it before it draws anything: it says how far to turn that page clockwise, and the only figures allowed in it are zero, ninety, a hundred and eighty, and two hundred and seventy. Turning a page here writes that figure and does absolutely nothing else. The drawing operators are left alone, the embedded fonts are left alone, and a scanned bitmap comes out the same bitmap at the same resolution it arrived at. Almost every site offering to do this works the other way round, by drawing each page into a picture at whatever resolution it fancies and putting the picture back where the page was, which turns a thirty kilobyte typed invoice into a megabyte photograph of one and hands you a document whose words can no longer be selected, searched or read aloud. Moving and dropping pages is the same idea a level up: the ones you kept are copied into a new document in the order you left them.
The two jobs this page does are the ones that make people give up on a PDF and go looking for the original. A scanner that fed a page in the wrong way up. A report assembled by three people where the appendix landed in the middle. A ten page pack where two pages belong to somebody else’s project entirely and cannot be sent on.
None of that is difficult work, and none of it is worth uploading a document to a stranger for. The pages of a PDF are objects in a file with an order and an angle, and rearranging them is editing a list. What makes it feel difficult is that the desktop tools which do it well cost money and the free ones on the web all want the file first.
So this is the same job with the file staying where it is. The grid is the interface on purpose: you can see what each page is before you decide where it goes, which is the part a list of numbers in a text box cannot give you, and it is why the pictures are drawn from the document itself rather than guessed at from a page count.
Questions
Does turning a page make the file bigger or blurrier?
Neither. It sets a number in the page, so the file grows by a few bytes at most and the content is bit for bit what it was. That is the check worth doing on any site that offers to rotate a PDF. If the result comes back several times the size of what you gave it, your pages have been photographed rather than turned.
What if the scan was already sideways before I started?
Then a quarter turn here moves it a quarter from where you are looking at it, not a quarter from wherever the scanner happened to leave it. The angle already in the page is read back and added to, which is the only behaviour that makes sense when the document you are fixing is the one that was already wrong.
Can I put a page back after I have dropped it?
Yes. Nothing is decided until you press save, so a page you dropped by accident comes back with the button that puts the whole document back as it was, and you can start the arrangement again. Dropping a page never touches the file you opened.
Why does it stop at sixty pages?
Because past that the grid is longer than anybody wants to drag across, and an interface that makes you scroll four screens to move one page is not doing you a favour. For a longer document, take the section you care about out with the page splitter first, arrange that, and join it back on.
Other things here
There is a full list on the free tools page. They all work the same way: in the browser, with nothing to install.
The tool is free. So is the thought.
This page did one small job. Edmund is for the thing you thought of while doing it: a capture app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that files a note the moment you have it, so it does not get lost between having it and writing it down.
See what Edmund does