How to scan a document to PDF

What you need

A phone or computer with a camera (or photos you have already taken), a flat surface, and decent light. That is all. PDFScanner runs in your browser, so there is nothing to install.

Scan a document to PDF, step by step

1. Open the PDFScanner scanner in your browser and choose Use camera. Allow camera access when your browser asks. If you already have photos, choose Upload document instead.
2. Photograph the first page, then the next. Each photo becomes one page. PDFScanner finds the edges of the paper and straightens it for you.
3. Check each page. If an edge is wrong, open the page and use Adjust crop to drag the corners. Rotate the page if it is sideways.
4. Pick a look for text pages: Auto for most documents, Black & White for high-contrast text, Grayscale to keep some tone. Adjust brightness and contrast if the page looks dull.
5. Reorder or remove pages with the arrow and bin buttons, then choose Create PDF and download it.

Get a clearer scan

• Use even light. Daylight from a window works well; avoid a shadow from your hand or phone falling across the page.
• Put the page on a plain surface that contrasts with the paper, such as white paper on a dark table. Edge detection depends on that contrast.
• Hold the phone directly above the page, parallel to it, and fill the frame without cutting off the edges.
• Keep the camera steady and let it focus before you capture. A sharp photo reads better than a large one.
• Photograph pages one at a time rather than a stack or a book spread, unless you plan to crop each half separately.

Scanning several pages into one PDF

Keep adding pages before you create the PDF. They appear in the strip under the preview in the order you added them. Select a page to move it earlier or later, or to remove it. When you create the PDF, all pages are combined into a single file.

Make the PDF easier to use

A PDF made from photos is a set of page images, so the words are not selectable and the file can be large. Two follow-ups help. If you need to copy the words, run text recognition (OCR) on the pages. If the file is too big to email, use the PDF compressor and check the size estimate before you commit.

Common problems

• The camera will not open: check that your browser has camera permission for the site, that no other app is using the camera, and that the page is loaded over https.
• The page is cropped wrongly: use Adjust crop and drag the four corners to the paper's corners, or choose Whole page.
• The scan is too dark or has a shadow: retake it in brighter, more even light, or raise brightness and contrast.
• You only have a photo of one half of a page: crop it to the part you need and add the other half as another page.