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Participant
June 18, 2025
Question

How to set AUTO rotation of ALL PDFs to always open in landscape orientation?

  • June 18, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1180 views

Hey guys, 

 

I am trying to figure out if there is a setting where I can force Acrobat Reader to ALWAYS open PDFs in landscape orientation? They always open in portrait mode because that's the layout of the scanner bed, but our content is almost always in landscape orientation. Obviously I can simply rotate each PDF upon opening, but I open far too many every day to waste time changing the orientation of every single one, every single time it's opened. Work smarter not harder!

 

Any ideas?

TIA!

1 reply

Participant
June 18, 2025

Also, I know you can change the orientation to always open in a certain orientation in individual PDF's, but I deal with thousands of different single-page documents, and are constantly scanning in new documents, so it's not really feasible to try to manually change the orientation of every document. Thanks!

AnandSri
Community Manager
Community Manager
June 19, 2025

Hello @barry_2556

 

I hope you are doing well, and thanks for reaching out.

 

There is no global setting in Adobe Acrobat Reader that forces all PDFs to open in landscape orientation by default. Acrobat respects the original orientation of the PDF as defined during scanning or creation. This is why your documents—scanned in portrait—always open that way.

Even though you can rotate the view manually (via View > Rotate ViewThis change is temporary and resets when the file is reopened

 

Workarounds You Can Try: 

 

Use Auto Portrait/Landscape in Print Settings: If you want to print in landscape, regardless of the scan orientation, open a PDF and go to Menu > Print. In the print dialog, select “Auto portrait/landscape” under Page Sizing & Handling. Save this as a custom preset in your printer settings
Note: Acrobat uses the printer driver’s default orientation. So if your printer is set to portrait, Acrobat will follow that unless overridden.

 

Batch Rotate PDFs Before Use: If you receive many PDFs in portrait but want them in landscape, use Organize Pages > Rotate in Acrobat Pro (not Reader) to rotate pages in bulk.

 

Automate with Acrobat Pro Actions (if available). If you have access to Acrobat Pro, create an Action Wizard to rotate all pages to landscape. Apply this action to folders of scanned PDFs.

 

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Anand Sri.