Organize PDF Pages

How to use

1. Drop the document on the page. The page count appears on the file card and the thumbnails fill in as you scroll to them.
2. Drag a card into the gap where it belongs, press its Move button and tap a slot, or focus it and press the arrow keys.
3. Use Turn left or Turn right for a quarter turn, and Duplicate when a page needs to appear twice. Select several pages to turn or delete them together.
4. Delete pulls a page out of the plan and Restore puts it back. Add blank and Append PDF bring new pages in at the end, ready to be moved into position.
5. Press Apply & download once the grid reads correctly from top to bottom.

About this tool

Organize PDF pages by looking at them rather than by counting. The document comes back as a grid of page thumbnails that render as you scroll down to them, so a long scan doesn't lock the tab up while it thinks. Drag a card and the others slide aside to let it in. Without a drag, press a card's Move button and tap one of the slots that open across the grid. Focus a card and the arrow keys walk it one slot at a time, with Home and End for the two extremes. On a phone, set What a touch drag does to Move first, so a swipe still scrolls until you ask it not to.

Every card carries its own controls. Turn left and Turn right move that page a quarter turn either way and the thumbnail swings with it, starting from whatever rotation the scanner already wrote onto the page, so a page that came in the other way round costs one press, not three. Duplicate drops a copy directly behind the original, which is how one divider page ends up used four times. Delete marks the card as deleted instead of removing it, and a Restore button takes its place. Each card also has a Preview button for the pages where a small thumbnail isn't enough to tell what you're looking at. Tap the page itself to select it, and Turn left, Turn right and Delete in the toolbar act on every selected page at once.

Two more buttons sit in the toolbar. Add blank puts an empty sheet on the end, sized from the first page of the document you opened. Append PDF pulls a second file in whole, and its pages join the grid marked with a letter so you can tell them from the originals, while the rail beside the grid lists each file and its page count. Append as many files as you need. Between those and the delete control, a batch of scans that came off the feeder in three separate pieces can be assembled into one document in a single pass.

Nothing is written until you press Apply & download, so the grid is a draft for as long as you want it to be. When you do commit, the surviving pages are copied into a fresh document object by object rather than re-rendered, which is why a 300 dpi scan is still 300 dpi afterwards and text in a born-digital page is still selectable. Each rotation goes in as the page's own rotation entry, so every reader opens it the right way up. The file lands under your name with -organize on the end, and a note above the grid says how many pages it saved.

A nine-page scan, tidied up

Say the courier's cover note is page 1 and you don't want it, pages 4 and 5 went through the feeder sideways, and page 8 somehow ended up ahead of page 7. Open the file and 9 pages appears on the file card. Select pages 4 and 5, press Turn right once in the toolbar, and watch both thumbnails come upright. Drag page 8 back behind 7. Hit Delete on the cover note and its card is marked deleted with a Restore button sitting on it.

Apply & download hands you scan-organize.pdf at eight pages, the two feeder mistakes the right way up and the last two back in sequence. The cover note is just gone.

Good to know

• A password-protected PDF won't render here, so the grid never appears and you get a message naming the password as the likely reason. Run it through Unlock PDF first and the copy that comes back opens fine.