How to scan documents with your phone into a searchable PDF
Class notes, a signed form, an ID for a procedure, a receipt. With the phone you already have, you can get a PDF that looks scanned and whose text can be searched and copied.
What you need
- A phone with a camera and a browser. There's nothing to install.
- Good light. Daylight near a window works best.
- A flat surface darker than the paper, like a wooden table. The contrast helps aval find the edges of the sheet.
Step by step
- Open aval Workspace on your phone and tap Scan.
- Hold the phone parallel to the sheet, with the whole page in the frame, and take the picture.
- Check the corners. aval places them on the edges of the paper; drag them if one is off.
- Take the next page. You can scan up to 50 sheets in one go.
- When you finish, the pages arrive as one PDF in your documents, straightened and in order.
Try it with your own file
aval Workspace is free and works without an account.
Try it free, no accountTips for a clean scan
- Avoid your own shadow. Stand so the light comes from the side, not from behind you.
- Don't use the flash on glossy paper. It leaves a white glare that hides the text.
- Flatten folded sheets before taking the picture. A curved page reads worse.
- One sheet per picture. Two pages side by side come out smaller and harder to read.
- If a page comes out blurry, take it again before moving on.
Make the text searchable
A scan is a picture of a page. You can read it, but you can't search it, copy it or have it read aloud. Text recognition, also called OCR, turns that picture into text while keeping the page exactly as it looks.
In aval, the inspector tells you which pages have no text. Choose Recognize text and the language of the document. It works with Spanish, English, Ukrainian and Russian, and with Spanish, Russian or Ukrainian mixed with English. Printed text is recognized well; handwriting, in general, is not.
Once the text is recognized you can find a word across all your documents, copy a paragraph, or save the file as PDF/A, the format meant for long-term archiving.
What to do next
- Compress it if you have to send it by email or upload it to a form.
- Sign it, if it's a form that needs your signature.
- Merge it with other documents, for example the front and back of an ID with an application.
Questions
Do I need to install an app?
No. aval works in the phone's browser. If you want, add it to your home screen and it opens like an app.
Can I turn photos I already took into a PDF?
Yes. Upload them and choose Images to PDF.
How many pages can I scan at once?
Up to 50 sheets in a single scan.
Does OCR work with handwriting?
Printed text is recognized well. Handwriting, in general, is not.