Scan to PDF on your iPhone

How to scan to PDF on iPhone with Scanfone

1. Open Scanfone and tap Scan.
2. Hold your iPhone above the page and let the document camera capture it. Repeat for every page.
3. Tap Save to finish the scan.
4. Choose a filter and fix the page order, rotation or any pages you want to remove.
5. Save the PDF to a Scanfone folder or to Files, or share it straight away by email or message.

Why scan to PDF at all?

A photo of a document works until somebody asks for "a PDF, please". Banks, landlords, schools, insurers, HR departments and government forms almost always want PDFs, and for good reasons: a PDF keeps pages in order, looks the same on every device, prints at the right size and can hold many pages in one file. Ten photos in a chat thread do none of that.

Scanning to PDF with your iPhone gives you that file in the time it takes to find the scanner at the office, and without the walk.

Scan to PDF in Scanfone, step by step

Tap Scan and hold your phone over the page. Scanfone uses Apple's document camera, which detects the edges of the paper and corrects the perspective, so a page shot at a slight angle still comes out straight and rectangular. Keep going to add pages. When you are done, you have one multi-page PDF.

Then tidy it up. Pick a filter: Original, Color, Gray or Black & white. Rotate pages, drag them into order and delete the blurry one. Give the file a sensible name and put it in a folder. That is the whole process, and there is no paywall at the save step, which is exactly where many scanner apps like to spring theirs.

Already have photos? Turn them into a PDF too

Sometimes the scan happened last week as a regular photo. Scanfone can import photos and PDFs, so you can turn pictures from your library into a proper PDF, combine them with new scans or add pages to an existing document. If that is mostly what you need, the JPG to PDF page explains it in detail. Going the other way? See PDF to JPG.

What you can scan to PDF

• Contracts, letters and signed forms
• Receipts and invoices for expenses, see the receipt scanner
• ID cards with front and back on one page, see the ID card scanner
• Passport photo pages, see the passport scanner
• Book pages and printed handouts, see the book scanner
• Whiteboards after a meeting, see the whiteboard scanner
• Business cards, see the business card scanner

A PDF you can search and copy from

Every scan goes through on-device text recognition (OCR). Your PDF is searchable, you can copy text out of it, and the search in Scanfone looks inside the text of all your documents, not just the file names. Need the text on its own? Export PDF to text as a TXT file, free.

Finish the job without leaving the app

Scanning to PDF is often step one. Step two is signing, sending or shrinking it. Scanfone includes free tools to sign the PDF, add text, a watermark, page numbers or footer text, redact sensitive parts, merge several PDFs into one, split one into several, and compress a PDF that is too big for an email or upload form. Then share, print or save to Files.

What it costs

Scanning to PDF in Scanfone is free and unlimited: no ads, no account, no daily limit. Free PDFs carry one small line under each page, "Scanned free with Scanfone", and never a watermark over your content.

Scanfone Pro removes that line and adds sync between your phones, 1 TB cloud backup and Word/PowerPoint export for $2.99 the first year, then $19.99 a year. No weekly plans, cancel in one tap. More on the pricing page.

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