PDF Reorder Pages

When page order goes wrong

The usual causes are mechanical. A duplex scan run as two single-sided passes produces all the fronts followed by all the backs, needing an interleave rather than a simple move. A document assembled from several sources arrives with its sections in the wrong sequence. A stack fed upside down produces a document in exact reverse. Each has a different fix, and identifying which one you have saves a lot of dragging.

Specifying a new order

Entering an explicit sequence such as 3,1,2,4 is faster than dragging for anything beyond a handful of pages. The sequence is read as physical positions in the source document, and every page you want to keep must appear: pages omitted from the sequence are dropped, which makes reordering a way to delete by omission if you are not careful. Check the count of your sequence against the page count before applying.

Interleaving two scan passes

For a document of N sheets scanned as fronts then backs, the correct order is 1, N+1, 2, N+2 and so on. If the second pass was fed in reverse, which is what happens when you flip the whole stack, the backs are in descending order and the sequence becomes 1, 2N, 2, 2N-1. Getting this wrong produces a document that looks plausible but has every other page from the wrong place.

What moves with the page

Page content, annotations anchored to the page and form fields on it all travel with it. Internal links that target a page object follow correctly. Links that target an absolute page index do not, and neither do bookmarks in some documents, so an outline may point at the wrong pages afterwards. Verify the bookmark panel if the document has one.

Local processing

Reordering is performed in your browser, so a confidential document being reorganised is never uploaded.