How to scan documents to PDF with your phone
You do not need a scanner to send a signed form or keep a copy of a receipt. A phone camera and a browser are enough. This guide covers taking photos that turn into a tidy PDF, and making the result searchable.
Open Scan to PDFTurn photos of paper documents into a tidy PDF, straight from your camera.
Take photos that scan well
- Light it evenly. Daylight from a window works well; avoid your own shadow falling across the page.
- Lay the page flat on a dark, plain surface so its edges stand out.
- Hold the phone square-on, directly above the page, so the text is not stretched at an angle.
- Fill the frame with the page, leaving a small border.
Good photos make the biggest difference to how the PDF looks, and to how well text recognition works later.
Turn the photos into a PDF
- Open Scan to PDF in your phone's browser. There is nothing to install.
- Tap Take a photo: on phones and tablets it opens the camera directly. You can also choose photos you have already taken.
- Drag the pages into order, and choose the page size (A4, Letter, or the size of each photo), orientation and margins.
- Create the PDF and download it.
Phones often save a portrait photo sideways together with a note saying which way up it goes. Papermint reads that note, so pages come out the right way up, exactly as they looked on your phone.
On the Free plan each task takes up to 3 photos. For a longer document, create it in parts and join them with Merge PDF, or use Premium, which takes up to 25 at once.
Make the text searchable
A scan is a picture of text, so you cannot search it or copy from it yet. OCR PDF recognises the words and adds an invisible text layer, keeping the page looking exactly the same. OCR is part of Premium. It handles printed text in several languages; handwriting is generally not recognised.
If the file is too large to email, compress it before running OCR, not after. See how to make a PDF smaller for email.