OCR text recognition on iPhone

How to use OCR text recognition on iPhone with Scanfone

1. Open Scanfone and scan a document, or import a photo or PDF.
2. Save the document. Text recognition runs on your iPhone.
3. Open the PDF and select text to copy it into another app.
4. Use search to find words inside this document or across all your documents.
5. To get only the words, export the document with PDF to text as a TXT file.

What OCR does, in plain words

A scan is a picture of a page. You can look at it, but your phone cannot read it: you cannot search it, select a sentence or paste a phone number into your contacts. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that. It looks at the picture, recognises the letters and adds a text layer to the PDF.

The page still looks exactly like your scan, but now it behaves like a real document. You can search it, select it and copy from it. In Scanfone this happens automatically, for free, on every document you save.

What you can do with recognised text

• Searchable PDFs. Every saved scan gets a text layer, so other apps can search it too. See how to make a PDF searchable.
• Copy text. Select a paragraph, an address or a reference number and paste it anywhere.
• Search everything at once. Scanfone's search looks through document names and the text inside all your scans. Type "warranty" and find that receipt from last spring.
• Export to TXT. Turn a scan into plain text with PDF to text, free.
• Work with imported files. Import photos and PDFs from Files or your photo library and they get the same treatment.

On-device OCR: your text never leaves the phone

Many OCR services send your page to a server, read it there and send the text back. That is a strange thing to do with a tax letter, a medical form or a contract. Scanfone runs text recognition on your iPhone. Scanning and OCR happen on the phone, and nothing is uploaded unless you turn on Pro sync.

There are no ads, no tracking and no analytics in the app, and no account to create. If a document needs extra protection, put it in the Safe, a folder locked with a PIN and Face ID.

Where OCR helps the most

• Receipts and invoices. Search by shop name or amount instead of scrolling. Start with the receipt scanner.
• Contracts and letters. Find the clause about notice periods in seconds.
• Books and study notes. Copy quotes from a scanned book into your essay.
• Whiteboards. Clear writing on a scanned whiteboard becomes searchable too.
• Business cards. Copy a name, email or phone number from a scanned card.

Getting the best OCR results

Text recognition is only as good as the picture it reads. A few habits help:

• Good light, no shadows. Even daylight beats a single lamp.
• Flat, straight pages. The document camera fixes perspective, but crumpled or curved paper still bends the lines.
• Sharp focus. Hold still for a moment. Rescan anything blurry.
• High contrast filters. Gray or Black & white make printed text stand out and help recognition.
• Print beats handwriting. Clear handwriting can be recognised, but messy notes will always be less accurate than printed text.

OCR should not be a paid extra

In a lot of scanner apps, text recognition sits behind a premium plan, next to the save button that also sits behind a premium plan. In Scanfone, OCR, search, copy and TXT export are free and unlimited, with no ads, no account and no paywall when you save.

Free PDFs get one small line under each page that says "Scanned free with Scanfone". Scanfone Pro removes that line and adds sync between your phones, a 1 TB cloud backup and Word export for $2.99 the first year, then $19.99 a year. No weekly plans, cancel in one tap. See pricing.

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