Command line: How do you rotate a PDF file 90 degrees?

Question

When I scan documents that are landscape-oriented, the output PDF files are portrait and so all the PDF viewers display the scanned documents in portrait.

From the command line, how do you rotate a PDF file 90 degrees?

I tried searching and found a bunch of solutions but I had trouble finding what looked like an authoritative solution[1] that uses a stable and robust Linux/Unix tool.

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footnote [1]

For example, here is a sampling of some of the haphazard solutions I found:

• "just use Adobe Acrobat Pro to rotate the file and then save the file"
• "use pdfjam"
• "use PDFtk"
• "use ${PROGRAM_NAME} from Poppler"
• "use ImageMagick's convert" -- but then all the comments were very negative and stating "the image quality is ruined"
• "open the file in a PDF viewer, then rotate, then print using a PDF printer like cutePDF or PDF printer or etc"
• "use ${PROGRAM_NAME}", then I searched for "${PROGRAM_NAME}" and there is something about "Fedora removed ${PROGRAM_NAME} because of licensing issues"

Answer 1

Use PDFtk.

1. For rotating clockwise:

    pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endeast output output.pdf
   

2. For rotating anti-clockwise:

    pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endwest output output.pdf
   

Regarding the installation of PDFtk on Fedora, I found these links:

• Pdftk substitute for Fedora 21 and 22
• Pdftk not available?
• Install pdftk on Fedora using the Snap Store

Answer 2

I just stumbled upon this thread and saw that there is no good solution mentioned yet. I found that (at least on Debian and Ubuntu) pdfjam comes with the following commands:

pdf90 input.pdf
pdf180 input.pdf
pdf270 input.pdf

I think that is the easiest and fastest approach. These are scripts using the pdfjam command properly. Btw. the pdfjam is a virtual package that comes with texlive-extra-utils

UPDATE

The above commands were dropped from pdfjam since version 3.02, and are now available (but unmaintained) in the package pdfjam-extras. The direct commands that work with pdfjam (as mentioned in the comments) are respectively:

pdfjam --landscape --angle 90 input.pdf --outfile outfile.pdf
pdfjam --angle 180 input.pdf --outfile outfile.pdf
pdfjam --landscape --angle 270 input.pdf --outfile outfile.pdf

Answer 3

In Linux Mint 18.3 (I believe in other Debian derived distributions as well) you have a simple command line tool named qpdf.

You can use: qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=[+|-]angle[:page-range].

From the documentation:

--rotate=[+|-]angle[:page-range]

Apply rotation to specified pages. The page-range portion of the option value has the same format as page ranges in Section 3.5, “Page Selection Options”. If the page range is omitted, the rotation is applied to all pages. The angle portion of the parameter may be either 90, 180, or 270. If preceded by + or -, the angle is added to or subtracted from the specified pages' original rotations. Otherwise the pages' rotations are set to the exact value. For example, the command qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=+90:2,4,6 --rotate=180:7-8 would rotate pages 2, 4, and 6 90 degrees clockwise from their original rotation and force the rotation of pages 7 through 9 to 180 degrees regardless of their original rotation, and the command qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=180 would rotate all pages by 180 degrees.

In your case, to rotate all pages in a PDF 90 degrees clockwise, you can do:

qpdf --rotate=+90 in.pdf out.pdf

Answer 4

You can use ImageMagick: display or convert - e.g. to rotate it clockwise use

convert -rotate 90 <file>.pdf <rotated-file>.pdf

Use -90 for a counterclockwise rotation.

N.B. Only use this method when the original image is a bitmap (e.g. produced by scanning). If the original image is not a bitmap, this method will convert it to one and quality will suffer. In the latter case, please use one of the methods in the other answers.

Answer 5

qpdf works great and is super fast!:

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with qpdf version 8.0.2 (see qpdf --version), but I suspect it would work fine on Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and 14.04 too, since I've used qpdf in other ways on all of those systems as well.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install qpdf

# Rotate in.pdf +90 deg and save as out.pdf
qpdf --rotate=+90 in.pdf out.pdf

# Rotate in.pdf -90 deg and save as out.pdf
qpdf --rotate=-90 in.pdf out.pdf

# Rotate in.pdf +/-180 deg and save as out.pdf
qpdf --rotate=+180 in.pdf out.pdf

The manual pages (man qpdf) show very little, but what they do show is very important. Here's a key part right at the end of it (emphasis added):

For a summary of qpdf's options, please run qpdf --help. A complete manual can be found in /usr/share/doc/qpdf/qpdf-manual.html or /usr/share/doc/qpdf/qpdf-manual.pdf.

So, read the full manual which is stored locally on your computer! Here are the links. Copy and paste them into your browser's address bar to open them. You can also view the manual online here: https://qpdf.readthedocs.io/.

1. Local QPDF manual location on Linux:
   1. QPDF User manual in PDF form: file:///usr/share/doc/qpdf/qpdf-manual.pdf
   2. QPDF User manual in HTML form: file:///usr/share/doc/qpdf/qpdf-manual.html

To see the help options, run qpdf --help instead. Or, even better, pipe to less:

qpdf --help | less -RFX

Then you can press / and search for --rotate. Here's a snippet from the help pages:

--rotate=[+|-]angle[:page-range]
                        rotate each specified page 90, 180, or 270 degrees;
                        rotate all pages if no page range is given

and:

The --rotate flag can be used to specify pages to rotate pages either 90, 180, or 270 degrees. The page range is specified in the same format as with the --pages option, described below. Repeat the option to rotate multiple groups of pages. If the angle is preceded by + or -, it is added to or subtracted from the original rotation. Otherwise, the rotation angle is set explicitly to the given value.

References:

1. qpdf --help | less -RFX
2. This answer by @Royi
3. QPDF on GitHub
4. Manual of QPDF (more extensive than man page)

Related

1. My answer: How to extract PDF pages by page number or range of page numbers

Answer 6

pdftk is no longer available on Ubuntu 18.04 due to some deprecated dependencies.

The best solution I found was the (graphical) tool pdfshuffler pdfarranger*.

Install (see the installation steps in https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger) and run it. Open the desired PDF file, select the files to rotate and then click the rotate button in the header bar (or use the right click menu). It can also concatenate PDFs and some other nice things.

* pdfarranger is a fork of the abandoned (?) pdfshuffler

Answer 7

To improve output resolution (default is 72 DPI), I got good results with:

convert -rotate -90 -density 200 input.pdf output.pdf

This was for a .pdf of a scanned document. I found that -density 300 reduced quality somewhat versus -density 200.

Answer 8

I needed to print a large PDF file (200+ pages) as a grouping of signatures for bookbinding.

• I used pdfjam to make the signature sets:

  pdfjam --landscape --signature 16 filename.pdf
  

• I opened the new pdfjam file in a viewer and printed odd pages.
• I put the stack of printed pages back into the printer flipped around, then printed even pages.

I now have a perfect set of signatures for binding. pdfjam flips the odd pages upside down and would need to be rotated 180 if you use the duplexer on your printer. Flip the pages manually after printing the odds and there is no need to rotate them electronically. I also found pdfsam to be a very useful tool for batching edits to PDF files.

Just hoping this manual flip might save someone some time.

Answer 9

Although it does have its limitations, I quite often use PDFedit, especially for the rotation of PDF scans. While ImageMagick's convert (using rather high -density values) achieves quite a good quality, it also bloats the file (original: 155 kiB, 180° rotated copy: 1.2 MiB). PDFedit rotates the same image with unchanged quality without noticably changing the file size.

Answer 10

I use this command to automatically rotate pdf files to become upright down if they aren't upright in the first place :

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/All -sOutputFile="$outputFile" "$file"