With a scanner app you can turn your smartphone into a portable scanner. Just point your camera toward any paperwork you want to scan and press on the shutter button just like you take a picture. When you scan paper, receipts, they will be saved as PDF documents on iPhone. You can then easily share the scanned PDF file with others through email or chat apps. You can see how to scan documents to email on iPhone using a paid app for iOS. In this article, we’d like to introduce a free PDF app which can help us scan documents to PDF, view PDF, edit PDF, convert PDF right on our mobile phones.
In a related article, we discussed how you can convert PDF to Word document on iPhone using a free PDF app for iOS – PDF element. Although it is not obvious, you can use it as your camera PDF scanner to scan documents to PDF on your iPhone. Here’s how.
Run the PDF app on iPhone, your files saved on iPhone will be listed in its home screen. Tap on the Add button (+ icon) at the top right corner to bring up a pop-up menu at the screen bottom. Choose Camera from the bottom menu, then point your camera at any paperwork, press the shutter button to scan the document. It is as easy as you take a picture of the document.
That’s not all. It even gives you a chance to edit the scanned document. For example, you can use a filter to add special visual effect to the scanned document, convert color doc to black & white doc, rotate the scanning, crop it and so on.
It is not a professional iPhone camera scanner app. Some advanced features are currently missing, such as the ability to automatically detect borders, scan multiple sheets of paper into 1 PDF, etc. After all, it is a specialized PDF editor app. We were pleasantly surprised by its PDF scanning function when using it convert PDF to editable Word document on iPhone.