Scan to PDF

A photo of a document has angled edges, uneven lighting and a gray or yellow cast. PDFDoco fixes all three. It detects the page's four corners and warps them into a true rectangle, working out the page's real proportions from the camera angle so an A4 sheet doesn't come out stretched. Then it estimates the colour of the paper across the page and divides it out, which removes shadows (including the one from your phone) and leaves clean white paper.

If the detection isn't perfect, drag the corner handles. They're made for fingers, with a magnifier that shows the exact corner under your thumb.

• Enhanced is the best all-rounder: shadow-free pages with colours intact, for forms, stamped letters, receipts and ID documents.
• Black & White gives crisp text with a threshold that adapts across the page, even in uneven light. Pages are stored at 1 bit per pixel, often ten times smaller than a colour scan.
• Grayscale keeps soft detail like pencil notes and photos, without colour or shadows.
• Original only crops and straightens. Use it for photos and colour-critical pages.

• Lay the page on a dark or contrasting surface, so its edges stand out.
• Use even light. Near a window is ideal; turn on the torch in dim rooms if your phone offers it.
• Hold the camera above the middle of the page and keep all four corners in view.
• Turn on Auto to capture as soon as the page holds still, which makes multi-page scans quick.
• Choose the highest camera resolution for small print, and Balanced compression for email.

Turn on OCR to make the scan's words findable. PDFDoco reads the page with the open-source Tesseract engine running in your browser, then places the recognised text as an invisible layer exactly over the words on the page. You can press Ctrl+F to search, select and copy text, and document systems can index it. It supports 28 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Russian. Accuracy depends on the photo, so good light and the Black & White or Enhanced filter help a lot.

Receipts and invoices for expense reports, signed contracts that need to go back by email, school assignments and handwritten notes, ID documents and proof of address, medical forms and insurance papers. For anything sensitive, processing on your own device means there's no copy on someone else's server to worry about.

Keep capturing and every shot becomes the next page. The thumbnail strip lets you drag pages into the right order, retake a blurry one without starting again, rotate or delete pages, and apply a filter to all of them at once. Choose A4 or Letter to get a standard printable PDF, or Fit image to make each page exactly the shape of your scan.

Scan to PDF works with whatever you have: the rear camera on a phone, a laptop webcam or a document camera, or photos already on your device. If your browser can't use the camera, or you'd rather not grant permission, upload photos instead and you'll get the same automatic cropping, straightening and filters.