Changing reading order rotates text 180 and makes it HUGE

That sounds like an unusual issue. Before changing the reading order, I'd check whether the PDF was created from a scanned document or exported from another application, since incorrect page rotation or OCR can sometimes affect how Acrobat interprets the content. It might also help to test the same file on another computer or with the latest Acrobat update to see whether the behavior is file-specific or environment-specific.

​Hi @makaylah_6533 

Hope you're doing well and thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.

Before I walk you through the best fix, a couple of quick questions to help me point you in the right direction:

1. When you exported the PDF from Canva, was the "Flatten PDF" checkbox unchecked? A flattened PDF merges everything into a single image layer and can cause exactly the kind of rotation and sizing chaos you are seeing.

2. Which version of Acrobat Pro are you on? You can check under Help > About Adobe Acrobat. This will help confirm whether the newer cloud-based auto-tagging is available to you.

3. Is the document a two-column layout throughout, or does the problematic column only appear on certain pages?

Why this happens

Canva PDFs exported directly can have severe accessibility issues, including missing tags and poor reading order. Canva's tagging may not be robust enough for downstream remediation in tools like Acrobat. The root cause of the rotation and size explosion is that the Reading Order tool is also controlling the architectural (stacking) order of elements. When an item is moved up or down in the Order panel, it can change the stacking order of the PDF layers, similar to Send to Front / Send to Back, which causes some items to become hidden or visually displaced behind other elements.

The fix is to stop using the Reading Order panel's drag-to-reorder approach for this document and use the Tags panel instead.

Step-by-step: fix reading order via the Tags panel (without moving visual elements)

First, save a copy of your file before you start. Undo/redo is not supported for all Reading Order operations, so saving first is essential.

1. Go to Hamburger menu > View > Show/Hide > Side panels > Accessibility Tags.

2. Expand the full tag tree and click through each tag one by one. The corresponding content will highlight in the document so you can see exactly what is tagged where.

3. Once you identify the two text columns, reorder them by dragging their tags up or down directly inside the Tags tree, not in the Order panel. By changing the order of a highlighted region in the Order panel, you effectively change the reading order of that item without changing the actual appearance of the PDF. However, for this scenario, working in the Tags tree directly avoids the stacking order conflict. Please check the helpx https://adobe.ly/4h7ctQG for more information.

4. Verify the result by going back to the Reading Order dialog, selecting Show Order Panel, and confirming the numbered sequence is correct.

For the full official walkthrough of the Tags panel, the Adobe Help article on Editing document structure with the Content and Tags panels is the best reference.

If the tag structure is too broken to fix: start fresh on the page

If the columns are hopelessly interleaved in the tag tree, the cleanest option is to clear and re-tag that page using the auto tag feature as described here https://adobe.ly/4h2Tgjb 

Hope this will help.

~Amal