Reorder PDF pages

Move pages around inside a PDF — put a page first, reverse a scan that came out back to front, or shuffle a few into the order they should have been in. The rearranging happens in this browser, on this computer: the file is not uploaded, because burrow has no server that could receive it.

This tool needs JavaScript

The rearranging is done by code running in your browser, so with JavaScript switched off there is nothing to do the work. There is no server-side version to fall back to — that is the whole design, not a missing feature.

With JavaScript on, this page lets you choose a PDF, type the order you want its pages in, and download the result. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Saying what order you want

Type the pages you want moved. They come first, in the order you type them, and every page you do not type keeps its current order after them. So on a ten-page document, 3 puts page 3 first and leaves 1, 2, 4, 5… following it; 4, 2 puts those two at the front in that order.

Ranges work, and they can run backwards: 2-5 moves those four to the front in order, and 10-1 reverses the whole document — which is what the Reverse the order button types for you.

The page shows the order your pages will come out in before you run anything. That is there because the rule above is a rule rather than a guess, and the way to keep it one is to let you see the result rather than take our word for it.

There are no page pictures yet. Choosing pages here means knowing their numbers, and for reordering that is harder than it is for the other tools — turning a page you can find by number, but deciding where a page should go usually means looking at it. It is a real limitation rather than an oversight: showing pages means rendering them, and rendering a long document needs a memory ceiling burrow does not have yet. It is being built; until it is, this page does not pretend to offer it.

What happens to large files

Everything is held in this browser tab's memory, so the practical limit is what your device can spare rather than an upload size. burrow refuses a file larger than 512 MB before it opens it, and a document of more than 10,000 pages before it moves any of them — so an oversized job is refused rather than failing part way through and leaving you with something incomplete.

What that does not save you from, said here rather than discovered: a very large document that is under both limits can still make the tab slow while it runs, and on a phone the browser may stop the tab entirely. That is the device's memory ceiling, reached inside the PDF engine where nothing can intervene.

What is kept, and what is not

Every page, and everything attached to the document. Reordering moves pages around; it does not remove any. Bookmarks, attachments, form fields and annotations all come through, and what each page displays is unchanged — including pages that inherit their rotation or their size from the document rather than carrying it themselves, which is the case most likely to go wrong and the one burrow's tests check directly.

The document's internal page tree is rebuilt. PDFs store pages in a tree, and moving a page makes the PDF engine flatten that tree into a single list. Nothing a reader shows you changes, and no page is lost — but the file's internal structure genuinely differs from the original, so a byte-for-byte comparison of the two will not match. That matters to nobody reading the document and to anybody comparing its bytes, which is why it is written here rather than left to be discovered.

A signature does not survive. No tool here preserves one — any change to a PDF invalidates a digital signature — but it is worth saying on this page in particular, because "the pages are the same pages" is true and the file is still not the same file.

A file that is encrypted, damaged, or not a PDF is refused. So is an order that would not give every page back exactly once: type a page twice and burrow says so rather than handing you a document with one page duplicated and another gone.