I have a pdf file shown upside down. So I use Okular to rotate it and it looks good. The problem is, The next time I open it with other software, it's still upside down. If I open it with Okular, it is not.
I am wondering what's happening underhood.
Another great and tiny program for this is PDF-Shuffler and its fork PDF Arranger.
merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface
You can install it from the software center, or through the command-line.
For Ubuntu 22.04 and later:
sudo apt install pdfarranger
For versions before Ubuntu 22.04:
sudo apt install pdfshuffler
With Ubuntu 22.04 and later:
pdfarranger
With versions before Ubuntu 22.04:
pdfshuffler
If you want to rotate all pages, click on one, then press Ctrl+a to select all.
Or you can select as many as you want individually by holding down Ctrl as you select.
According to the man page for pdftk, one of the operations is rotate and you can save the rotated file:
The page rotation setting can cause pdftk to rotate pages and
documents. Each option sets the page rotation as follows (in
degrees): north: 0, east: 90, south: 180, west: 270, left:
-90, right: +90, down: +180. left, right, and down make
relative adjustments to a page's rotation.
Example (will rotate pages 1 to 5 +180 degrees, i.e. vertically / upside down):
pdftk original.pdf rotate 1-5south output new-rotated.pdf
However, pdftk is quite powerful and it's better that you read the man pages and use pdftk --help to meet your exact needs.
If you want to take a look at man pdftk without installing it, here's a link for 13.10: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/saucy/en/man1/pdftk.1.html
To clarify, this is what you use to rotate 180 degrees:
pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endsouth output output.pdf
# \_______/ \___/\___/ \________/
# input file range | output file
# direction
Where direction can be any of these:
Okular and other PDF viewers like Evince (part of GNOME) or Atril (part of the MATE desktop) rotate only the view of the PDF and when saving, the changes are kept in the Application settings but the PDF itself is not rotated.
There are other Desktop applications like pdf-shuffler and pdfmod and command line tools like pdftk that allow you to do what you want.
If you are living in the year 2021:
PDFshuffler recently did not get so much love anymore and there is a more active fork of it, which is called PDFarranger. You can install it with:
sudo apt install pdfarranger
It is also available through the Ubuntu-software. Have fun :)
For Okular or any other PDF viewer tool which lets you rotate one page but it's not saving it in the source pdf, you can use the Print... option and choose to Save as PDF.
I rotated PDF with success, using "PDF Arranger" which is GUI based tool, pre-loaded in my MX Linux (based on Debian GNU/Linux 10). Cannot be easier. Rotate it, then save it; done.
