Few people today purchase a separate scanner. People who deal with printed documents and photos a lot, or people who don't like digital methods. Most of today's financial, medical, and legal documents are in digital form, but the problem is the house with a child in school. Slightly different documents of the same form must be constantly hand-signed. Sometimes you have to submit it on paper.
For those users, Apple has built a scanner feature into the Notes app. This allows you to capture a page or image as a document and then edit it directly using the built-in markup tool. You can export your captures to PDF, then fill in the form or make other modifications.
If you look around me or look at online forums, it seems that not many people know how good this feature is. Like most iOS/iPadOS apps, Apple is gradually improving the Notes app, but many still remember more that they were missing or didn't work properly in earlier versions of the Notes app. If the Memo app really lacks functionality, you can turn your eyes to a third-party app. It is also possible to digitize text through optical character recognition (OCR), use advanced editing functions, and assemble the final document.
Scanning with Notes app
The Memo app supports efficient and highly compliant document scanner functionality. How to use it is as follows.
- Open the Notes app.
- Create a new note or select an existing one.
- Press the camera button and select'Scan Document'.
- Place the document under the camera. It should be as flat and square as possible. If the automatic setting is enabled (an 'automatic' indicator appears in the upper right corner of the screen), the Memo app will automatically capture a document whenever it detects it. Therefore, simply place a document under the camera and hand it over to scan it automatically. Or even if the camera focuses on a series of pages. Documents are captured by tapping the shutter button in auto mode, or pressing the shutter after changing auto to 'manual'.
- In the auto mode, only parts of the document are automatically cut after the document is captured. In the manual mode, on the other hand, you can adjust the corners of the document and select 'Reprint' or'Keep scanned items'. Here you can adjust the color to capture or set the flash.
- Scanning continues until all pages are captured.
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| The Notes app automatically picks out only documents placed in a contrasting background. |
To export a document, select the file in the note, hit the share button, and choose the options available. The export format is always PDF. You can also open the same note in the Mac Notes app to check it out. By enabling iCloud syncing for the Notes app, you can view and edit these files anywhere, as well as export them as PDFs.
Since the content of the scanned document is digitized, it is also possible to search for identifiable text. However, in my testing, Apple didn't support the ability to select this text on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, or export it as a PDF with embedded text. If you need these features, you should use a third-party app.
Scanning with a third-party app
Many iPhone and iPad scanning apps offer some extra features to the basic features of the Notes app, as you can see earlier. There's also a scanning app that supports faxing (sometimes useful), but I couldn't even find an app that clearly states the cost of scanning and sending faxes.
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| Adobe's Scan App |
The most popular and feature-rich of these apps is Adobe Scan, made by Adobe. With the free version, you can scan documents and export them in PDF format, where you can select and copy text just like a preview app or any other PDF reading app.
Additional features are available for $9.99 a month ($89.99 a year) or by subscribing to Creative Cloud. It supports additional advanced features such as exporting to other formats such as Word or inserting pages into documents. This is a necessary feature for users who need to deal with a large number of documents, scan a book or scientific magazine to make the final document, or extract text.
In addition, there is the Microsoft Office Lens. It's a free app that can be used alone and can also be used with Microsoft's apps and storage services. Among the paid apps, SmileOnMyMac's PDFPen, which I have used for many years, is very flexible and the interface is familiar. The price is $6.99.
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