It is not immediately obvious that you can scan documents with Notes (one of the apps that comes with the iPad), but, once learned, the process is both quick and easy. The scans can be uploaded to your iCloud drive, then downloaded to your Mac or PC.
(My iPad is running iOS 12.3.1.)
1. Open the Notes app.
2. Tap the ‘pen on paper’ icon at the top right. This will open a new note and the keyboard appears.
3. Dismiss the keyboard.
4. Tap the plus sign at bottom right.
5. A dialog appears. Tap ‘Scan Documents’.
6. The rear camera is activated. Position your document so that it fills as much of the screen as possible, whether in portrait or landscape view.
7. Four icons are visible on the right of the screen. (Notice that they switch position if you change from portrait to landscape view and vice versa. If you are using landscape view, position the iPad with the home button on the right so that the camera lens is not obstructed by your hand.) The large, white circle is the ‘shutter release’; the smaller icon above it (three overlapping circles) lets you choose whether to optimise for colour printing, greyscale, monochrome, or a photograph. Optimisation of a scan can also be done later (see Step 12). ‘Auto’ allows the shutter to operate by itself when it thinks it’s got the edges right. The iPad will try to determine the edges of the document for you; this can be assisted if your document is placed on a black, or at least a strongly contrasting, background.
8. A yellow rectangle indicates the area the iPad thinks you want to scan. Even if it is mistaken, press the shutter release icon. A pale rectangle now appears with a small circle at each corner. If necessary, drag these circles to the corners of your scan.
9. If you’re not happy with the result, tap ‘Retake’ at the bottom left; or ‘Keep Scan’ at the bottom right.
10. Now you can scan another document, up to a total of about 15 if you wish to create a single PDF (e.g. a year’s bank statements). Once you have made all the scans in the series, tap ‘Save’.
11. A new view opens showing you your notes. If necessary, scroll to ‘Scanned Documents’ and tap on it.
12. Four icons appear at the top right. The first lets you adjust and crop the scan; the second activates the optimiser (see Step 7); the third lets you rotate the scan anticlockwise in steps of 90º; the fourth lets you share or save the scan. If you tap the fourth, a self-explanatory dialog appears. Scroll the lower half of this to see the ‘Save to Files’ icon.
13. Tapping this icon lets you save the scan to your iPad or to a selected folder on your iCloud drive.
An iPad cannot replace a dedicated flatbed scanner if you need to make high-quality image files or run OCR software, but it is very handy for processing documents such as bank or credit card statements, receipts, etc., that you would rather have in digital form. One advantage of using an iPad for scanning is that it can cope with odd paper sizes such as foolscap, which is too big to fit ordinary consumer-grade scanners, most of which are limited to A4 size.
No comments:
Post a Comment