Naturally, you don't carry around a flatbed scanner with you to digitize documents, receipts, business cards or hand-written notes and sketches.
But a newly updated app called Scanner Pro from Readdle can turn your iPad or iPhone into a powerful – and portable – scanner to accomplish these kinds of tasks.
While it's missing a key feature -- which I'll get to momentarily -- this business app works very well, and with exceptional "scan" quality based on my experience with the new iPad and its superior rear camera.
Ideal for any hard copies you want scanned and saved, Scanner Pro allows you to capture paper documents, contracts, magazine pages, whiteboards, business cards, cheques and receipts – and the digital version shows up on the iOS screen a second later. More so than other scanner apps I've tried, text is incredibly crisp and clear. Paper photos can also be scanned, and they look remarkably good.
For optimum quality, you'd lie the paper down onto a flat surface, like a desk, stand above it with your iPad, and line up the edges with the on-screen gridlines (such as an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper or magazine article). Tap the photo button on the edge of the screen, hold still, and you'll see a flash and hear a camera click. Once captured, you can tweak the edge alignment, if needed, and select a desired size (e.g. A4, letter, Ledger, Business Card, etc.) or type of scan (photo, document or grayscale).
Once saved to the iPad, you can rotate between landscape and portrait modes, create multipage scans, crop out unwanted areas and more. Scanned papers are automatically saved within the app but you can also email, save in your Camera Roll, open as PDF in a supported app (such as iBooks), wireless print or upload to a cloud service like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs or WebDav.
You can also assign a password in order to view the document, fax it somewhere or manually transfer scanned docs to a PC or Mac (by dragging and dropping from within iTunes).
Disappointingly, one thing Readdle's Scanner Pro app does not do is OCR, or "optical character recognition." This is a handy feature when scanning documents because OCR software can translate typewritten (and in some case, handwritten) words into editable text. Once it can recognize words, you could perform tasks like search for a keyword within a document, get a dictionary definition by tapping on a word or tally up multiple receipts for your expense report. You get the idea. Because the scan quality is so good, it's a shame OCR isn't included but perhaps it will in a future update.
Even with this omission, Scanner Pro is an excellent app for those who'd like to digitize and organize their paper world.
