How to reorder the pages of a PDF

Scanners feed pages in the wrong order. Documents get assembled from parts that arrive out of sequence. Reordering is the small, fiddly job that ends with you re-printing and re-scanning the whole thing — unless you can just drag the pages around.

Dragging thumbnails

Reorder PDF Pages renders a thumbnail of every page. Drag them into the order you want and process — the new PDF follows the arrangement on screen. Nothing is added or removed; the same pages come back in a different sequence.

There is also a text field taking an order like 3,1,2 for anyone who prefers typing to dragging, or who is reordering a long document from a list they already have.

The whole-document reversal

A stack fed into an automatic document feeder the wrong way round produces a PDF in exactly reverse order. Rather than dragging every thumbnail, type the page count down to one — 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 for a ten-page file — and it flips in one step.

Rotation is a separate job

Pages that are in the right order but lying on their side need Rotate PDF instead: reordering changes sequence, rotation changes orientation. A scan can easily need both, in either order.

The thumbnails are rendered inside your browser tab. A document you are reorganising is never uploaded to be previewed.

Bigger rearrangements

If sections need to move between documents rather than within one, split the file into pieces first, then merge them back in the order you want. For a handful of pages that simply do not belong, Remove Pages is quicker than shuffling them to the end.