Scan to PDF

Your phone is a scanner — with one missing piece

Photographing documents is effortless; the missing piece is what makes the result useful. A photo of a contract is just pixels: unsearchable, uncopyable, invisible to the systems that index your files. Scan to PDF adds the missing piece — OCR (optical character recognition) that reads the text in your images and embeds it as an invisible, selectable layer beneath the original appearance.

The output looks identical to your scan but behaves like a real document: search finds terms inside it, text copies out cleanly, and screen readers can speak it.

Capturing scans that OCR well

Recognition accuracy tracks input quality more than anything else. Clean captures routinely exceed 95% accuracy on printed text.

• Shoot straight-on in even light; shadows across text are the top accuracy killer.
• Fill the frame with the page and keep it flat — curled edges distort characters.
• Pick the correct document language before running OCR.
• For flatbed scans, 300 DPI is the sweet spot; higher adds size, not accuracy.

OCR that respects confidentiality

By default, recognition runs in your browser — your IDs, medical records, and contracts are processed on your own hardware and never uploaded. An optional cloud turbo mode is available for heavy batches, transferring files over encrypted HTTPS and deleting them after processing; the choice is explicit and yours. Dozens of languages are supported either way, free, with no page quotas.

After the scan

A searchable scan unlocks the whole toolkit: extract its text with PDF to Text, get the gist of a long document with the AI Summarizer, translate it, or convert it to editable Word. For multi-document scanning sessions, capture everything into one PDF and use Split PDF afterward to file each document separately.