You've heard horror stories: rotating a PDF and watching the quality drop, images get blurry, text become fuzzy. Some tools do that — they re-render the page during rotation, which is unnecessary and lossy.
Flint doesn't re-render. Rotation is metadata only.
How lossless rotation works
PDFs include a rotation hint on each page descriptor. Flint changes that hint. The page contents — text streams, image objects, vector paths — are untouched. When a reader displays the page, it applies the new rotation hint at render time. No re-encoding of any content occurs.
Why some tools lose quality
Cheaper or older rotation tools 'flatten' the page during rotation: convert the page to an image, rotate the image, embed it back as a new page. The image conversion introduces compression artifacts. The vector text becomes a raster. Quality drops. Avoid these tools.
Compare before and after
Open your original and the Flint-rotated copy side by side at 200% zoom. Pixel-for-pixel identical for images. Text rendering identical for sharpness. The only difference is orientation.
Compression is a separate concern
If you're worried about file size, compress the PDF — but that's optional and unrelated to rotation. You can rotate without compressing. You can compress without rotating. Most users want neither to affect the other.
FAQ
Does file size change after rotation?
Barely. A few bytes for the changed page descriptors.
What about scanned PDFs?
Scans rotate losslessly too. The image is unchanged; only its display orientation is changed.
Will OCR still work?
Yes. The OCR text layer rotates with the page. Search still finds your text.
Any rotation that does cause loss?
Non-90-degree rotations would, but those aren't supported by PDF or by Flint. 90, 180, 270 — all lossless.
Rotate. Save. No quality dropped. Rotate losslessly.