How to scan documents with your phone into one searchable PDF

Take the pages

1. On your phone, open Scan to PDF and press Turn the camera on. Allow the camera when asked.
2. Put the page on a table darker than the paper, in even light. Avoid the shadow of your own hand and phone.
3. Hold the phone above the page. When a green outline appears and it says Page found - hold still, keep still for a second. The page is taken by itself.
4. Put the next page in the same place. Carry on until you have them all, then press Done.
5. If a page was cut in the wrong place, press Corners under it and drag the four dots to the corners of the paper.
6. Choose Colour, cleaned for pages with stamps or highlights, or Black and white for plain text. Press Save as a PDF.

Make the words searchable

Your scan is now a set of pictures. To search it, copy a line, or turn it into Word later, the words have to be read out of the pictures. This is called OCR.

1. Open OCR a scan and drop the PDF you just saved.
2. Press Read the words and save. The first time, the reading engine downloads once (about seven megabytes). Then each page takes a few seconds.
3. Open the result and press Ctrl+F. The words are found, and the pages look exactly as before.

If the file is too big to send

A scan made at full quality can be large. Compress PDF with Rebuild the pages as pictures makes a scan much smaller. Do this before OCR, not after, so the words stay searchable in the final file.

Tips for a better scan

Light matters more than the camera. Daylight from a window, not a lamp above you, gives the cleanest pages. A white page on a white table is the hardest case, because the page edges cannot be seen - put it on something darker. Flatten folded paper under a book for a minute first.