How to fix the page order in a scanned PDF
Feeding a stack through a scanner reliably produces pages in the wrong order, upside down, or both. Reordering and rotating takes a minute and does not touch quality.
Organise pagesScanners produce disordered documents with impressive consistency. Feed a stack through a sheet feeder and you get the pages reversed. Scan a double-sided stack in two passes and you get all the fronts followed by all the backs. Turn the paper the wrong way and half the document is upside down.
All of this is fixable without rescanning, and fixing it costs nothing in quality — pages are moved and rotated, not re-encoded.
The two ways to reorder
In the editor, the page rail down the left shows a thumbnail of every page. Drag one to a new position and the rest close up around it. There are also arrows on each thumbnail for moving a page one step at a time, which is more precise when you only need a small correction.
For a heavier rearrangement, the Organise pages tool shows every page as a larger thumbnail in a grid, which makes it much easier to see what you are doing across a long document. Drag pages into place, rotate or delete individual ones, and apply the whole set of changes at once.
Reversed pages
A whole document in reverse is the classic sheet-feeder result. Rather than dragging every page, it is quicker to work from both ends: move the last page to the front, then the new last page to position two, and so on. On a long document, splitting it and recombining in the right order is faster still.
Fronts and backs in separate blocks
Scanning a double-sided stack in two passes gives pages 1, 3, 5, 7 followed by 2, 4, 6, 8. They need interleaving. For a short document, drag each back page into place after its front. For a long one, use Split to separate the two halves and Merge to bring them back together in the right sequence.
Watch for one detail: the second pass is frequently in reverse order relative to the first, because the stack is flipped as a block rather than page by page. Check the last page of the document against the last page of the second batch before assuming they line up.
Upside-down and sideways pages
Rotation is a property of each page, so individual pages can be turned without affecting the rest. Use the rotate buttons on a page thumbnail, or the Rotate tool if the whole document needs the same correction.
Rotating changes how the page is displayed, not the image data. There is no quality loss, and you can rotate as many times as you like.
Removing the pages you did not want
Scanning a stack usually picks up things you do not need: a cover sheet, a blank reverse side, a duplicate that fed through twice. Delete them from the page rail or the Organise tool, or use Delete pages if you have a list of page numbers to remove in one go.
Blank reverse sides are the most common. Scanning double-sided pages where only one side is printed produces a document that is half empty, and removing those pages roughly halves the file size as well as making it readable.
Combining scans from more than one batch
Documents that would not fit through the feeder in one pass end up as several files. Merge joins them in the order you list them, so getting that order right before merging saves rearranging afterwards. If one batch came out reversed, fix that batch on its own first, then merge; correcting the order inside a merged 200-page document is considerably more work.
Getting it right the first time
If you scan documents regularly, a few habits save this work entirely: use your scanner’s duplex mode if it has one rather than two manual passes, check whether it offers a "reverse order" setting for sheet feeders, and scan a two-page test before committing a hundred-page stack. Most of these problems are a setting, not an accident.