How to: Rotate pages from Portrait to Landscape using Acrobat Pro XI?

[retireordie]

As title states need to know how to do this on a multi-page document.

E.g. out of a 10 page document, pages 4-7 need to be changed from portrait to landscape.  Note must keep the document scaling once pages 4-7 are changed to landscape.

Tried Tool > Rotate and it does not work.  Rotating 90 degrees or 180 degrees do not present the document in landscape format. Researching the forums does not provide a solution.

Can someone help provide specific steps for Acrobat Pro XI?  Thanks!

[Sara_Forsberg]

Hi retireordie,

You are following the correct steps to rotate the pages (choose Rotate from the Pages pane on the Tools panel). Does the content appear to rotate, but the page isn't in landscape orientation, or is nothing rotate when you choose the Rotate command (if so, is the PDF secured)?

Are you running into this issue with a particular document, or do all PDFs behave this way? Are you on Mac OS or Windowsar

We look forward to hearing back from you.

Best,

Sara

[retireordie]

Hi Sara.  Thanks for the prompt reply.

The content only rotates 90 degree without changing to landscape orientation.

Also when I select the following steps nothing happens.
Tools > Rotate > Direction: Clockwise 90 degrees (just to test) > pages 4-7 (refer to original post example) > Rotate > Even and Odd Pages > Landscape pages

The pdf is not secured.  All pdfs behave like this, using Windows OS 8.

I've searched the forums no one posted solutions how to fix this in Adobe Acrobat Pro XI.  Got any ideas how to resolve?  Thank you!

[Test Screen Name]

Never heard of a this issue. Perhaps we are expecting different things. Here is a portrait page:

and I apply Rotate Clockwise 90 degrees. Here is the result:

Document scaling is preserved. (Of course 180 degrees does not change to portrait, but it makes it upside down).

This to me has worked as expected. Were you expecting something different? For example, were you expecting the effect you would have in Word if you changed page setup from portrait to landscape, where the contents would not rotate, but would reformat to fit the new page - which certainly isn't what happens in PDF.

[retireordie]

Hi Test Screen Name, thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately that's exactly what I do not want to happen.  I want to see the original document in Portrait changed to Landscape while maintaining the contents and nothing getting cropped.  Yes exactly as it can be done as you mentioned in MS Word.  Do you know how to achieve this?  Thank you.

Btw, the only way I did this was using the print mode and that allowed me to play with the page scaling from Portrait to Landscape.  Unfortunately I could not save the document in Landscape.  Thoughts?

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

What you are describing is 100% NOT how PDF files work. They are not Word documents and work nothing like them. They are much more like finished paper sheets. You can turn a piece of paper all you like, but the contents turn with the paper. You are actually asking for something hugely complicated to happen, and PDF files just don't do anything like that.

[retireordie]

I see.  Well that is unfortunate since that is how I need to modify the source documents.

Does anyone else have suggestions how to achieve the desired affect?  Thanks.

[Test Screen Name]

You should never modify a PDF if the source documents (original) are available. Always make any change, no matter how small, to the source documents.

If the source documents are lost and you have only PDF, you might be able to export to Word. It may look something like the original page; anyway it will be a head start in recreating this content, which is basically what you need to do.

[retireordie]

So if I understand you correctly, are you saying I need to convert the desired pdf pages that need to be landscaped into Word, then covert them back into pdf and merge them using Acrobat Pro?

And yes I do not have the source documents they were provided to me from another company.  So I am limited with the poorly displayed documents on-hand.

[CtDave]

Hello,

Yes, your understanding is correct.

PDF was never designed to function as a word processor, spreadsheet, page layout, etc. file format.

PDF's "design" (see ISO 32000-1:2008) does not tolerate word processor like / page layout like / spreadsheet like "edits".

Touchups of textual content can be done. But, too much of this can goober a PDF into something that cannot be used.

With proper applications (typically Adobe stuff) images on a PDF page can be edited and the edited image parked back into the PDF.

So, author and edit with authoring applications. Always keep the authoring files out of harm's way.

No authoring file? Zut alors! If the PDF page content is predominately textual then export to Word, clean up, edit, output the groomed authoring file content to a fresh PDF.

Be well...

[Sara_Forsberg]

[discussion moved to Creating, Editing & Exporting PDFs forum]

[andrewz11044033]

Hello retireordie,

I realize that it has been a number of weeks since you posted your request, but I just discovered it today as I was desperately trying to accomplish the same thing!  After trying to convert to Word and then back again, I discovered something simple (assuming you are using a pc or otherwise running Windows): if you have a print option that is either print to PDF or print "Microsoft Print to PDF" (a feature of Windows 10 / Word 13), you can go to print--as you said you did--change from portrait to landscape, and then print to PDF.  A dialog box will come up just as if you were saving the document, and you can then save the changed document to your folder.

Maybe this can help in the future.

Andrew Zimmerman

[Test Screen Name]

If you have Acrobat you get a (much superior) PDF printer anyway. But printing PDF to PDF is frequently damaging.

[PR173746]

Thanks! After a few hours of yelling at my computer for something that should be so simple, this little trick worked!

[christopherf30149088]

inside Acrobat Pro DC -> I clicked on Organize pages, then click on a particular page, then click on the rotate clockwise button, and the page turned into landscape format...

[brianh47298635]

Since this came up high on Google, maybe this helps someone in 2019...

As has been pointed out, you can do it in PDF, but there is a workaround:

Open the PDF in Photoshop. Change the canvas size to 8.5x11, flatten image, save as PDF.

[Dov Isaacs]

Opening a PDF file in Photoshop causes all text and vector objects to be rasterized, all color management to be lost, all spot colors to be lost, all transparency to be lost, all searchability to be lost. And depending upon the resolution used when opening the PDF file in Photoshop, output quality from the resaved PDF may be totally wretched due to pixelation.

As such, such a “solution” is absolutely not acceptable in that is most likely to be highly lossy unless the original PDF file page was strictly a raster image with no text and no vector images.

          - Dov