Why does this happen?

  • The paper went into the scanner the other way. Feeding landscape pages into a portrait scanner records them turned, and the page keeps that rotation.
  • The reader rotated the view, not the file. View rotation is temporary. Close the file and it is back, because nothing was saved.
  • A flipped stack produced upside-down backs. Scanning the backs of a stack after flipping it gives every other page at 180°.
  • Pages came from sources with different orientations. A merged bundle can mix portrait and landscape, and each keeps whatever it arrived with.