Scanner Pro v. DocScanner iphone apps?

October 18, 2009 5:56 PM

iPhonefilter: What's a good iPhone app for document scanning?

Most often, I'll be scanning single page documents and single page graphics with or without text. I'll want to email the images as PDFs. My chief objectives are: 1) ease of use (and ease of directly emailing the scan from the app, if possible) and 2) visual clarity. Cost of the app is not a concern. Any advice from the hivemind would be appreciated!

posted by applemeat to technology (6 comments total)

Evernote is free to use, and allows you to search for text that has been scanned. You can print anything to pdf via the usual means on a Mac.
posted by furtive at 6:13 PM on October 18

Sorry, what I meant to say was that if you take a picture using Evernote, it will recognize text in the photo and that text can show up in your search results later on.
posted by furtive at 6:14 PM on October 18

I will just use the regular camera application.

Also, check this out... The iPhone scanner stand

I tried Evernote a while back, but the application was slow and crashes frequently.
posted by jchaw at 6:45 PM on October 18

I'm using JotNot for cleaning up whiteboard captures. It can also clean up photos of documents. It can do perspective correction, and improve contrast. You can email directly from the app in various image formats, including PDF (it doesn't do OCR) There are a number of similar apps, but I haven't tried them both because jotnot is cheaper, and it does a good enogh job.
posted by Good Brain at 6:52 PM on October 18

Visual clarity of your "scans" is going to be best with an iPhone 3GS, although older iPhones can get pretty decent results using the Clarifi case from Griffin, which is a case with a built-in Macro lens to improve readability.

Getting the image into PDF format from the phone is the real challenge and, if doing that without interacting with a desktop computer is the most important thing in this workflow to you, then JotNot into Evernote is probably the most robust solution. It's a real life-saver and I recommend it to all of my clients. Here is a demonstration for your perusal. Another alternative would be the MyScanner app, although I have no experience with it.

The Evernote iPhone app is free and, in addition to providing a pretty seamless "mobile OCR" experience, also allows you to use it as a portable document wallet (free service with PDF and a few others / paid service with more). The JotNot app that integrates with Evernote is a paid product, but I believe it's currently on sale.

In the very near future, Adobe will likely release an iPhone app for their Acrobat.com service. One imagines that you will be able to upload the JPEG to their server where it will be converted into PDF format and either stored in your account or delivered to you. And when Adobe turns on the iPhone app goodness, you could even have your PDFs emailed directly into your Evernote account where they will be OCR-ed and indexed automatically.
posted by Veritrope at 11:09 PM on October 18

Oh...and two more options that I found for you: Scanr and Qipit -- which are both on-line, pay services.
posted by Veritrope at 11:16 PM on October 18