How to rotate a page in pdf file without using the `Rotate` key value?

Question

It seems that pdf file has some internal mechanism in handling the page rotation, that when you rotate a page in your software (adobe reader, mac os preview, etc), the software will only add a rotation marker to the page instead of changing the orientation of the page in storage. (I think this is the same mechanism as the way mpeg handles video rotation.)

My question is, is there any command line tool that I can rotate a page in pdf file solidly? That instead off simply applying a marker, I want the actual page in storage to be rotated, like any virtual pdf printer will do.

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Update:

On page 78 of the PDF Specification 2008, it mentions that the PDF's page object has an integer key value Rotate that you can set to tell the software how the page should be displayed. This value shall be multiple of 90 degrees.

So what I am trying to achieve here is:

Rotate the page (say) 90 degrees physically instead of simply setting the Rotate key value to 90. (That's to say the value of Rotate should remain 0 after rotation.)

Answer 1

You should use a software that can write PDF files, as opposed to just displaying them. Adobe Reader and Mac OS preview were never intended to edit PDF files, as their names clearly suggest.

You have three types of solution:

1. online services
2. GUI desktop software
3. command line tools

You seem specifically interested in the third category, but you'll find examples of all three mentioned in the answers to this same question on UnixLinux.

PDFtk:

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

pdfjam:

pdf90 input.pdf

Ghostscript:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/All -sOutputFile="$outputFile" "$file"