A flatbed scanner used to be the only way to get a clean PDF of a paper document. Today the camera in your pocket has more resolution than most office scanners; what it lacks is the flat, even, square-on view. Scan to PDF fills that gap in the browser: it finds the page in your photo, straightens it, cleans up the lighting and binds the pages into one PDF.
Use camera opens a live preview inside the page, with a frame guide. Tap Capture once per page and keep going; the count in the corner shows how many you have. Switch camera flips between the back and front cameras.
Take photo hands over to your phone's own camera app, which often gives sharper, full-resolution pictures and handles focus and exposure well. Upload images takes photos you already have, several at once, including iPhone HEIC files, JPG, PNG and WebP.
Paper is usually the brightest thing in the picture.
The scanner shrinks a copy of the photo, blurs it slightly and splits it into bright and dark areas with an automatic threshold. It then takes the largest bright region, checks that it is a sensible size, and picks its four outer corners. For white paper on a table, floor or bag, that lands on the page corners in most photos.
It can fail when the background is as bright as the page, when a corner is cut off, or when a hand covers an edge. Then it falls back to the whole photo. Click the page to open the corner editor and drag the four handles onto the paper corners, or move them with the arrow keys for fine control. Auto edges and Detect again restore the automatic result.
A page photographed at an angle is a trapezoid: the far edge looks shorter than the near one. Perspective correction solves a small set of equations that map your four corners onto a rectangle, then samples every pixel of the output from the right place in the photo. Text lines come out straight and parallel, as if the page had been on a scanner glass.
The output size follows the page's real proportions in the photo, capped by the quality setting, so a receipt stays long and narrow and an A4 sheet stays A4-shaped.
Original keeps the photo's colours. Auto colour stretches the brightness range so the paper turns white and the ink darker, with colours made a little richer. Grayscale does the same without colour, which suits pencil notes and faint print.
Black and white is the classic document look. Instead of one threshold for the whole page, it compares each pixel with its neighbourhood, so a shadow across one corner or a darker fold does not turn into a black patch. Printed text and receipts come out crisp, and the files are small. Brightness and a contrast or ink strength slider fine-tune any filter.
Every page shows as a thumbnail of the final result. Drag thumbnails to reorder on a computer, or use the up and down arrows on any device. Rotate fixes sideways pages and Delete removes retakes.
Page size can be A4 or US Letter, with the scan fitted inside and centred, or Same shape as the scan. Orientation can follow each page or be fixed, and the margin can be none, small or big. Quality sets the resolution: Smaller file for email limits, Balanced for everyday use, High detail for small print. Name the file and press Create PDF.
You need three restaurant receipts in one PDF by the end of the day. Lay the first on a dark desk, press Use camera, and tap Capture; repeat for the other two, then press Done. Each thumbnail already shows a straightened receipt, because the pale paper stands out against the desk.
The second receipt has a thumb over one corner, so the crop is loose. Click it, drag the top right handle onto the real corner, and watch the preview update. Set Filter for all pages to Black and white, keep A4 with a small margin and Balanced quality, name the file expenses-september and press Create PDF. The three pages download as one small, sharp file ready to attach to the claim.
Put the paper on a darker, plain surface, shoot from directly above in even daylight, keep all four corners in the frame and hold still for a second. Flatten folded pages with a book edge if you can.
The finished PDF contains images of the pages, so the text cannot be searched or copied yet. If you need that, run the file through an OCR tool afterwards. Photos are processed entirely in your browser and never uploaded, which is useful for IDs, bank letters and medical paperwork.
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