In Preview, when I add text annotations to my PDF (lecture note slides), they look fine until I close it and reopen it, and then they are rotated 90 degrees. How do I fix this and keep it from happening again?

I used to have the exact same problem.

Are all of you using dropbox? A lot of people in my class have this problem, and they all use dropbox. The ones that dont have this problem are not using dropbox (but they might be using older versions of preview as well...)

This solves the problem for me:

1. Quit dropbox when taking notes

2. Every time i open a new pdf i duplicate it (and rename it) in preview and use the new file instead

I have not had a single problem after I began doing this

Yes I use Dropbox. I will try this on the next lecture, thank you!

No, I don't use Dropbox and never have, so it's not the cause of my problem. Thanks anyway.

2 years after, still the same bug.... in Yosemite.

Apple, do you see my 3000$ for the next mac? Look carefully, because you won't have them. You will never get 1$ more from me. NEVER.

For those you have still this issue, you can use Skim. Their developpers FIX bugs at least.

Hi, the only solution I've found thus far is:

1. Start with a fresh / newly downloaded pdf (I'm a student so this is what I'm typically working with)

2. Open pdf in preview, save it, then close it

3. Open pdf again and make your notes- the annotations will not rotate upon reopening the next time

This is not an acceptable solution to something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place, but in the chance that it helps people's workflows I thought I would share it.

I had the same problem too, and i am looking for the alternative of preview.

I'm also having problems with this. As of now It seems that there is no clear reason for this problem. But it happens after I add notes and save the pdf, and quit then when reopening the pdf the annotations are rotated.

I'm switched to using skim till this problem is resolved.

It's 2015 now and this is still an issue. Apple, what gives? Please fix this. I'm downloading Skim now...

I had this problem as well.

As a solution I've used some tips from this forum to help fix it as best as i could.

I first went to View>Contactsheet so that i can see all of my slides. Then i command A (select all) to select all my slides and i rotated them to the right or left so that you would be reading it sideways. When i closed out of preview and reopened the pdfs, the text annotations were rotated as so that i could see them normally, if it didn't rotate to my liking i just did the same steps until they were back to normal when i opened it.

once they were the way i liked it i selected all slides in contact sheet, rotated it to normal so that i everything was back in place including the annotations and then i exported as pdf and replaced my old one.

Hasn't had the issue again yet.

Hope this helps

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, I found that if you rotate pages there, they will show up properly in Preview. My guess is that Preview (and Keynote and others) only add a rotation in the metadata of the page, while Acrobot actually rotates the entire page and reverses the dimensions.

Even if you've already saved your Preview annotations, this will still work. Acrobat will rotate the page properly and the next time you open the document in Preview, your annotations should line up where you intended.

If you do not have Acrobat Pro, perhaps other PDF editing software will work.

OS X 10.5.5 still has this issue, furthermore, I can't read the text while I type. It shows a skewed text box with the most recently typed characters missing which results in me guessing what letters I've already pressed and typos. Any suggestions for an alternative app besides Adobe Acrobat?

I have the same issue with Preview too. Using OS X Yosemite with the new Macbook.

I have tried all the suggestions you guys gave but none works out. The text boxes are still 90 degree rotated when I re-open them. This is very frustrating.\

Hope Apple will look into this issue soon.

I had this problem when I rotated PDFs before annotating. I solved the problem by rotating the entire PDF when it was created (e.g. going to the print menu -> Changing orientation to landscape -> Save as PDF) rather than manually rotating each page separatelyafterwards. I couldn't find a way to fix my old annotations but this seems like it will stop any potential future problems.

Hope this helps some people.

This worked like a charm! Thank you!!!

Thanks for the help t_burrr

You've offered the absolute best solution I've seen so far on this matter. Thanks your willingness to share with the community.

I found it took a couple tries of turning all the pages so the annotations could be read (File/Contact Sheet using "Command-A") and then closing and re-opening "Preview," followed by repeating the process of turning all pages and closing and re-opening the program, until the 90 degree or 180 degree flipped notes came back into place in the correct direction of the background. So far it's worked every time for me. A nasty bug in the system that thankfully we can think about and solve.

Appreciative,

Juli