You need a signed form, a payslip or a page of your passport as a PDF, and there's no scanner in the house. Your phone is the scanner. Both iPhone and Android phones have a free document scanner built in that finds the page edges, flattens the perspective and saves a PDF.
To be clear up front: EddiesPDF doesn't scan with your camera. The phone does the capturing. What we're useful for is the next part, turning that raw scan into something tidy: straight, searchable, in the right order and small enough to email.
The scanner that's already on your phone
On an iPhone, the Files app is the most direct route, because it saves a PDF straight into a folder:
- Open the Files app and go to the Browse tab.
- Tap the "..." menu at the top right and choose "Scan Documents".
- Hold the phone over the page. It captures automatically when it finds the edges, or you can tap the shutter.
- Scan any further pages, then tap Save. The PDF lands in the folder you were in.
The Notes app does the same thing. Create a new note, tap the camera icon (on recent iOS versions it's a paperclip) and pick "Scan Documents". The scan is stored inside the note, so you then open it and use the share button to save or send the PDF.
On Android, use the Google Drive app. Tap "+" and then "Scan". It works the same way: point, capture, add pages, save. The PDF goes to your Drive, and you can download it to the phone from there. Some Android phones also have a scan mode in the camera app, but Drive is the one that's on almost every phone.
Getting a scan that's actually readable
The phone's software does a lot, but it can't rescue a blurry or badly lit shot. What helps:
- Put the page on a flat surface. A page held in your hand curls, and the curve stays in the scan.
- Use daylight if you can, from the side. Overhead kitchen lights tend to throw the shadow of your phone right across the page.
- Use a dark background behind white paper. A white sheet on a white desk gives the edge detection nothing to find, and you end up with crooked crops.
- Fill the frame with the page. More of the camera's pixels on the text means sharper text.
- Hold steady for a second after it captures. Motion blur is the most common reason a scan is unreadable.
Turn the flash off. It usually makes a glare spot right in the middle of glossy paper.
Straightening and trimming the scan
Even with care, pages often come out slightly tilted. Deskew PDF fixes that. In "Automatic" mode it measures the tilt of each page from the lines of text and rotates the content back to level. If a page has no text for it to measure, there's a manual angle setting.
If the scan has a strip of table or a thumb along one side, Crop PDF trims it off.
Do the straightening before OCR. Text recognition is noticeably more accurate on level lines.
Making the text searchable with OCR
A phone scan is a picture of the page. You can't search it for a word, and you can't select a line and copy it. OCR PDF changes that. It reads the text on each page and adds an invisible text layer on top of the original page image, so the PDF looks exactly the same but you can search, select and copy.
Pick the document's language before you run it. OCR is far more accurate when it knows which language to expect, and there are 39 to choose from. If a document mixes two languages (a bilingual form, say), set a "Second language (optional)" as well. The language data is downloaded the first time you use a language, so the first run is slower. The scan itself stays on your phone.
On a phone this can take a while for a long document. A few pages are fine. For a 40-page scan it's worth doing it on a laptop. You can also choose "Text" as an output format if you only want the words in a .txt file.
The guide to making scanned PDFs searchable covers OCR in more depth.
Double-sided pages and multiple scans
Scanning a double-sided document on a phone usually goes one of two ways. Either you flip each page as you go (fine, the order is already right), or you scan all the fronts, flip the stack and scan all the backs. That second way is quicker, but it leaves you with fronts and backs in separate PDFs, and the backs come out in reverse.
Alternate & mix puts them back together. Put the fronts in PDF A and the backs in PDF B, tick "Reverse order" on the backs, and it interleaves them: front 1, back 1, front 2, back 2. The preview shows the result before you commit.
If you've scanned several separate documents and need them as one file, use Merge PDF. You can add photos to the merge too if some pages were taken with the normal camera.
Shrink it before you email it
Scans are big. Every page is a full image, so a long colour scan adds up quickly. Gmail tops out at 25 MB per email and many upload forms allow far less.
Run the finished PDF through Compress PDF. The default settings (Good quality, 144 ppi) are a sensible start. For scans of black text on white paper, open "More options" and set "Image conversion" to "Grayscale" as well; that usually makes the biggest difference. The guide to compressing a PDF for email explains what the settings do.
One order of steps that works well: scan, deskew, crop, OCR, combine, compress. Compress last, because every earlier step works better on the full-quality images. If a reference number or date in the final PDF is hard to read at full zoom, rescan that page in better light rather than hoping the recipient can make it out.
Also useful: Deskew PDF · Compress PDF · Alternate & mix · Merge PDF
