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How to Scan Documents to PDF with Your Phone

Banks, offices and online forms keep asking for a 'scanned copy' — but a plain photo of a document looks unprofessional: the page sits at an angle, the desk shows around it, and shadows fall across the text. A document scanner fixes all three. This guide shows how to turn phone photos of paper into a flat, clean, multi-page PDF, free in your browser — no app to install and nothing uploaded anywhere.

Step by step

1. Open the free Document Scanner and tap 'Scan or select pages'. On your phone, choose 'Take photo' to use the camera, or pick document photos you already took.
2. Each photo becomes a page in the list. For a multi-page document, add one photo per page, in order.
3. Tap 'Crop' on the first page and drag the four red corners exactly to the corners of the paper, then tap 'Apply crop'. The page is straightened and the background disappears.
4. Pick the look for each page: 'Enhanced' for colour documents, 'Grayscale', or 'B&W Document' for the crisp black-on-white result offices expect.
5. Use the arrow buttons to fix the page order, rotate any sideways page, then press 'Make PDF & download'. You can also save any single page as a JPG.

Tips for better scans

• Photograph the page from directly above, in bright, even light — avoid your own shadow falling across the paper.
• Put the document on a dark or contrasting surface; the crop corners will be much easier to place precisely.
• For text documents, the B&W Document look gives the smallest, sharpest PDFs — and it is what most upload forms are designed for.
• Before sending, open the finished PDF once and zoom in on the smallest print — if you can read it, the office can too.

Frequently asked questions