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1

imported comment rotated clockwise 90 degree

New Here ,
Jun 12, 2018 Jun 12, 2018

Hi,

I imported comment from a reference doc and it showed up rotated 90 degree clockwise in the destination doc.

I tried print to pdf but it doesn't work cause the destination doc is a secured doc.

Any help would be appreciated.

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1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Community Expert ,
Jun 12, 2018 Jun 12, 2018

I can explain why this happens, but unfortunately don't have a good solution to avoid the problem:

A PDF file can have a rotation flag that indicates if Acrobat (or any well behaved PDF viewer and printer) should rotate the page before it gets displayed. Let's say you scan a few letter sized pages, but the way your scanner rotates the pages, it looks like they are all rotated by 90 degree clock-wise. You don't want to have to tilt your head every time  you want to read this document, so you rotate them in Acrobat by 90 degrees counter clock wise (ccw), and the content finally looks correct. Acrobat does not actually rotate the page contents, it just saves a rotate property for the page(s), and Acrobat knows that before the page gets displayed, it needs to be rotated 90 deg ccw. Now the problem is that when you add annotations to such a page, they will be rotated as well, so that they match the page (and look correct when you display them in Acrobat). However, if you now replace one of these pages with a page that you created e.g. in MS Word, that page is very likely not rotated, and therefore does not have the rotate property (or it is set to 0 deg), This replaces your page image, but all of a sudden, the orientation (and position) of your annotations is wrong. The same thing happens when you export the comments from one document and import into a document with a different page rotation.

If you know what the source rotation was, and what the target rotation needs to be, you can take the coordinates and rotation flags from the saved comments file, and transform them so that they match the new file, and write out a modified comments file. A few years ago, I wrote a script that did that for one specific case, but unfortunately, I don't have access to that script anymore.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 12, 2018 Jun 12, 2018

I can explain why this happens, but unfortunately don't have a good solution to avoid the problem:

A PDF file can have a rotation flag that indicates if Acrobat (or any well behaved PDF viewer and printer) should rotate the page before it gets displayed. Let's say you scan a few letter sized pages, but the way your scanner rotates the pages, it looks like they are all rotated by 90 degree clock-wise. You don't want to have to tilt your head every time  you want to read this document, so you rotate them in Acrobat by 90 degrees counter clock wise (ccw), and the content finally looks correct. Acrobat does not actually rotate the page contents, it just saves a rotate property for the page(s), and Acrobat knows that before the page gets displayed, it needs to be rotated 90 deg ccw. Now the problem is that when you add annotations to such a page, they will be rotated as well, so that they match the page (and look correct when you display them in Acrobat). However, if you now replace one of these pages with a page that you created e.g. in MS Word, that page is very likely not rotated, and therefore does not have the rotate property (or it is set to 0 deg), This replaces your page image, but all of a sudden, the orientation (and position) of your annotations is wrong. The same thing happens when you export the comments from one document and import into a document with a different page rotation.

If you know what the source rotation was, and what the target rotation needs to be, you can take the coordinates and rotation flags from the saved comments file, and transform them so that they match the new file, and write out a modified comments file. A few years ago, I wrote a script that did that for one specific case, but unfortunately, I don't have access to that script anymore.

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New Here ,
Feb 28, 2022 Feb 28, 2022

I just tried to Flatten the rotated page.  It seems to have corrected the problem.

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 26, 2022 Apr 26, 2022

I have a ridiculous solution for this ridiculous problem. Open the target page in a photo editor. Rotate the target page to match those bad comment orientations. Save the page as a jpeg. Open the jpeg in acrobat pro dc. paste your comments. After much wasted time with support on remote going around and around, I found this more productive to get me out of the crunch. Looking for a decent PDF editor. Anyone know of one with all the functions (that work)?

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New Here ,
Apr 24, 2024 Apr 24, 2024

@quite fed up have you tried inkscape? it works on .svg instead of pdfs

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New Here ,
Apr 26, 2024 Apr 26, 2024

Print the destination doc to PDF, in orientation setting select Portrait, then in page set up select Ledger (17 " x 11"), Print and the new doc opens rotated but the comments and markups will paste properly. 

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New Here ,
Jul 14, 2025 Jul 14, 2025
LATEST

I had a similar issue where I had printed out a PDF "A" and had scanned a copy of it after writing some notes on it, making it document "B". My exported comments on document "B" were rotated 90-deg when attempting to import the same comments into the original PDF ("A"). My solution was to print out another copy of "A" and scan it back in ("C") - this allowed me to import the comments with the proper orientation.

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