Rotate PDF
Turn sideways pages the right way up without re-rendering them. Runs entirely in your browser.
Rotate PDF pages
Turn every page, or pick the sideways ones. Rotation is written to the page itself, so nothing is re-rendered or recompressed.
Rotation is one number, not a redraw
Every page in a PDF carries a rotation value: 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees. It tells the viewer how to present the page, and it is entirely separate from the drawing instructions that make up the content. Turning a page correctly means changing that number and nothing else.
A surprising number of tools do it the other way, rasterising each page into an image, rotating the pixels, and wrapping the result in a new PDF. It works, in the sense that the page comes out the right way up. It also converts your searchable text into a picture of text, softens every vector line, resamples every image, and usually produces a much larger file. The damage is invisible until you try to select a paragraph or zoom in.
This page changes the number. Whatever was in the document is still in the document afterwards, byte for byte, just presented at a different angle.
The bug that makes rotation feel broken
Scanned documents very often already carry a rotation, because the scanner recorded the page one way and tagged it to display another. When you ask to turn such a page 90 degrees, there are two possible interpretations: set the rotation to 90, or add 90 to what it already had.
Only the second is what anyone means. A tool that sets rather than adds produces the specific frustration of clicking rotate on an already-rotated page and watching it stay exactly where it was, or jump somewhere unrelated. This adds, so a page at 90 turned once more lands at 180, every time.
Why the whole document is selected to begin with
The common case by a wide margin is a document that is entirely sideways: a batch scan where the feeder was loaded the wrong way, or a phone photograph series taken in landscape. For that, having to select every page first would be pure friction, so everything starts selected and one click on Left or Right fixes the lot.
The other common case is a report where only the wide tables were rotated to fit. Select none, click those few pages, and turn just them. Both patterns are one or two clicks, which is the point.