Who Needs a Scanner? Scan a Document to PDF With Your Android Phone-gctid86423

[Ajamu]

Who Needs a Scanner? Scan a Document to PDF With Your Android Phone

                                                                             

 Scanning documents and OCRing them once meant slowly feeding them  through a desktop scanner before running slow, clunky OCR software. With  the advent of powerful smartphones, you can now quickly scan and OCR  documents with your phone's camera.

 This is perfect for receipts or any other physical documents you run  across that you might want to read later. No need to save all those  business cards, pamphlets and other pieces of paper — just scan them  with your smartphone's camera.

Google Drive

Android's integrated camera app doesn't have any OCR capabilities.  You could snap a photo of your document with the camera app and call it a  day, but if you want to store that document as a PDF and perform OCR on  it so you can search and understand its content, you'll want to use a  specialized app.

 Google Drive  is one such app that's made by Google. It has integrated  document-scanning and OCR capabilities. Snap a photo of a document and a  PDF copy of the document will be saved to Google Drive. It will also  use the power of Google's servers to perform OCR on the documents,  making it searchable in your Drive.

 To do this, open the Drive app on your phone, open its menu, and tap  Add New. Tap the Scan option in the list to scan and upload a document.  Note that you could also add the Drive widget to your home screen and  tap the camera icon on it to quickly open the Scan interface — this is  useful if you frequently want to scan documents.



 You'll now see the scanner interface. Point your camera at a document and tap the button to scan it into Google Drive.

 

 The great thing about this sort of app is that it's not just a photo —  Drive will extract the document part from the rest of the photo so it  can be saved separately as a PDF file. You're free to rotate and crop  the document before saving it to your Drive.

 
 
Evernote

 If you already depend on Evernote  to organize your brain, you'll be happy to hear that Evernote has this  feature integrated. It can snap a scan of a document with your phone and  save it as a PDF to your Evernote account, where you can access it from  anywhere. Evernote's OCR features will allow you to search through such  scanned documents.

 From within a note, tap the plus-sign button and select Page Camera.



Just center a page in the frame and tap the button to scan it. The  nice thing about Evernote's interface is that it makes it easy to scan  multiple documents and attach them to a single note without ever leaving  the scanner interface, while Drive is focused on saving each document  as a PDF file with a separate save process.


 

Other Apps

 Other services also have integrated document-scanning and OCR  capabilities, but you may not want to rely on any one service. There are  a wide variety of apps in Google Play that will scan a document to a  PDF and save that PDF to your phone's internal storage, where you can do  what you want with it — but most of these apps probably won't perform  any OCR on the document.

 Many of these apps are paid apps, but if you want a free one, we recommend Scan to PDF Free.  This app has no advertisements, watermarks, or other limited features.  It will allow you to quickly take a snap of a document and, like the  other services above, it will strip out the document part of the image  and save it as a PDF. Unfortunately, you'll have to adjust the cropping  part yourself — but it's a fast, free way to turn a document from a  piece of paper into a PDF file stored on your phone's storage.



For an app that's more focused on the OCR part of the equation, try Mobile OCR Free.  It won't save a PDF copy of your original document, it will only  extract text from a document — either one in an existing photo or one  you take a snapshot of with the app. This is convenient if you just want  the text from a document, but bear in mind that OCR isn't perfect and  you may have to do some tweaking by hand.


 

 Sure, this solution won't provide all the quality of a high-end  desktop scanner, but it's much faster and more convenient. It makes  scanning and OCRing documents something the average person might  actually want to do over the course of their day.

 Let us know if there's another app or service you prefer for scanning physical documents with your phone!