Daily tools · Tool

Document scanner

Photograph a page, set its four corners, and get a straight, clean scan. Add as many pages as you need and save them as one PDF.

Lay the page flat on a darker surface, in good light.

Runs on your device. The camera picture and the photos you pick are never uploaded or saved.

Better scans in four steps

Contrast

Put a white page on a dark table. The edge finder looks for the bright shape, so a white page on a white desk is hard to find: drag the corners yourself then.

Light without shadow

Daylight from a window works well. Hold the phone a little to the side so your own shadow does not fall on the page.

Straightening

The four corners are mapped onto a rectangle with a perspective transform, so a page shot at an angle comes out as if photographed from straight above.

Black & white

Each pixel is compared with the brightness around it rather than one fixed level, so text stays sharp even when one side of the page is darker.

Sources: ISO 216 (A-series paper sizes: A4 is 210 × 297 mm); Paul Heckbert, "Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping" (UC Berkeley, 1989), for the square-to-quadrilateral perspective mapping; Nobuyuki Otsu, "A Threshold Selection Method from Gray-Level Histograms" (IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1979), used to find the bright page; Derek Bradley and Gerhard Roth, "Adaptive Thresholding Using the Integral Image" (Journal of Graphics Tools, 2007), for black and white. The PDF is made on your device with pdf-lib (MIT licence). Photos are redrawn, so their hidden location and camera details are left behind.