Command line: How to rotate a PDF file 90 degrees

command linepdfpdftkpoppler

When I scan documents that are landscape-oriented, the output PDF files are portrait and so all the PDF viewers display the scanned documents in portrait.

From the command line, how do you rotate a PDF file 90 degrees?

I tried searching and found a bunch of solutions but I had trouble finding what looked like an authoritative solution[1] that uses a stable and robust Linux/Unix tool.

footnote [1]

For example, here is a sampling of some of the haphazard solutions I found:

"just use Adobe Acrobat Pro to rotate the file and then save the file"
"use pdfjam"
"use PDFtk"
"use ${PROGRAM_NAME} from Poppler"
"use ImageMagick's convert"
— but then all the comments were very negative and stating "the image quality is ruined"
"open the file in a PDF viewer, then rotate, then print using a PDF printer like cutePDF or PDF printer or etc"
"use ${PROGRAM_NAME}", then I searched for "${PROGRAM_NAME}" and there is something about "Fedora removed ${PROGRAM_NAME} because of licensing issues"

Best Answer

Just use PDFtk.

For rotating clockwise:

 pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endeast output output.pdf

For rotating anti-clockwise:

 pdftk input.pdf cat 1-endwest output output.pdf

Regarding the installation of PDFtk on Fedora, I found these links:

Related Solutions

Rotate PDF Pages – 90 Degrees for Even Pages and -90 Degrees for Odd Pages

This is easy since pdftk 1.44 which added the shuffle operation allowing different transformations on odd and even pages (amongst other uses).

If you have an older version of pdftk, you can use this Python script with the PyPdf library. (Warning, typed directly into the browser.)

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
input = PdfFileReader(sys.stdin)
output = PdfFileWriter()
for i in range(0,input.getNumPages()):
    output.addPage(input.getPage(i).rotateClockwise(90 if i%2==0 else -90))
output.write(sys.stdout)

Printing on custom paper size / adding paper size to PPD

According to : https://stackoverflow.com/a/3112256/544721 you need to add to your printer's file description four lines in appropriate places describing four properties of your page: PageSize, PageRegion, ImageableArea and PaperDimension.

Btw. Here is my try of adding description of S0929100 Cards roll to Dymo 450 LabelWriter: https://gist.github.com/gwpl/d6f90e41c5b07cd9f9262e4c6515037d , however it's still work in progress. Hopefully this will give you a hint, here is digest of mentioned gist with four lines - each should land in appropriate section of .ppd file:

*PageSize w144h252/S0929100 Cards - Appointment Name Badge 51x89 mm : "<</PageSize[144 252]/ImagingBBox null/cupsInteger0 0>>setpagedevice"
*PageRegion w144h252/S0929100 Cards - Appointment Name Badge 51x89 mm : "<</PageSize[144 252]/ImagingBBox null/cupsInteger0 0>>setpagedevice"
*ImageableArea w144h252/S0929100 Cards - Appointment Name Badge 51x89 mm : "0.00 4.32 141.12 235.44"
*PaperDimension w144h252/S0929100 Cards - Appointment Name Badge 51x89 mm : "144.00 252.00"

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