DocScanner / Scan to PDF

How to Scan Documents to PDF on iPhone

Your iPhone camera plus the right app replaces a desktop scanner completely, and in most cases beats it. Here is exactly how to scan any document to a clean, professional, shareable PDF in under a minute, for free, plus the details that separate a real scan from a photo of paper.

Scan a document to PDF in 4 steps

1. Open DocScanner and tap the blue scan button in the middle of the tab bar. The camera opens straight into document mode, there is nothing to configure.
2. Hold your iPhone over the page. The scanner finds the edges of the document automatically, corrects the perspective and captures the page the moment it is stable. For multi-page documents, just keep moving to the next page, every capture lands in the same scan session.
3. Review the pages. Pick a filter (Auto reads the page and usually nails it), rotate anything sideways, delete the blurry take, drag pages into order, then tap Save. The document lands in your library with a name and date.
4. Export as PDF. Open the document, tap Share, choose a quality level and you are done. Send it to Mail, Files, WhatsApp, Slack, or save it to iCloud Drive, anywhere iOS can send a file.

What separates a scan from a photo

Three things make a page look scanned rather than photographed: straight edges, flat perspective and even lighting. A raw photo has none of them, which is why photographed documents look unprofessional and are sometimes rejected outright by banks, universities and government portals.

DocScanner handles all three automatically. Edge detection crops exactly to the paper. Perspective correction makes a page shot at 30 degrees look like it was captured dead-on. Shadow removal evens out the lighting so your hand's shadow does not cut across the text. Page curl from books and rolled receipts is straightened at capture time, before the image is ever saved.

Every page is captured at up to 3200 pixels on the long edge, roughly 380 DPI for an A4 sheet. That is comfortably above what office scanners produce at their default settings, so text stays razor sharp when zoomed or printed.

Choosing the right filter

• Auto: analyzes the page and picks the best treatment. Use it 90% of the time.
• Color: keeps the document faithful, best for anything with stamps, highlights or images.
• Grayscale: neutralizes color casts from warm indoor lighting while keeping shading.
• Black & white: maximum contrast and minimum file size, ideal for pure text and forms.
• Original: no processing at all, when you want exactly what the camera saw.

PDF export options that matter

• Quality levels: Original for archives, Medium for email attachments, Small for messengers where every megabyte counts.
• Searchable text (Pro): embeds an invisible OCR text layer so the PDF can be searched and its text selected in Preview, Adobe Reader or any viewer. Recipients will assume it came from a real scanner.
• Password protection (Pro): the exported PDF demands a password before it opens, in every PDF app.
• Combine documents (Pro): merge several scans into one PDF, perfect for applications that want a single file.

Why not just use the Notes app?

The scanner hidden inside Apple Notes is fine for a single page once a month. It falls apart as a system: scans are buried inside notes, there are no filters beyond the default, no OCR search across your library, no password protected export, no tags, no folders designed for documents, and no way to combine or reorganize pages properly.

A dedicated document scanner treats your paperwork as a library, not an attachment. Every page is searchable by its contents, organized in folders with tags, and exportable with real options. If you scan more than occasionally, the difference compounds every week.

Frequently asked questions