Tag Archives: multi page scans

Why am I searching for a scanner, I have a iPhone that handles the process

My accountant sent me the final tax documents with instructions to print/sign/send back. After we signed, I went to fire up the printer/scanner when it hit me, I have an iPhone in my pocket. The simplest path would be to just take a picture of the signed documents and send the jpeg image to my accountant. Or, with the help of an app like JotNot, I can send cleaned up ‘scanned’ documents with just a couple more finger taps.

With JotNot, you can have a single page document or use multiple photos to create a multi page results. Launching the app, you are first presented with a list of previous ‘scans’ with options to bring in photos from your iPhone’s photo library or take new photos. If you choose to take a new document photo (I’m using a magazine here that was within reach since looking at my tax documents would be boring) you tap to focus then snap the shot or choose the Stabilize button for JotNot to take the picture automatically when you are still enough for a clear photo.

A interesting point, it is very hard to get a shadow free photo without using a low light source on the paper. I have the best luck photographing using the light coming in from a window.

JotNot has a feature a lot of the competing ‘scan’ app don’t, it automatically recognizes the corner or the document since it knows you won’t be able to be perfectly square on the document being photographed. If JotNot doesn’t get the corners ID’d perfectly, you can drag to tune. ‘Process’ in the upper corner takes the image, straightens it and creates a ‘cleaned’ document to share. The 90 degree button in the lower left corner is handy when I’m snapping a shot in a hurry and miss that the iPhone camera didn’t rotate correctly and I get a wide instead of a tall page image.

Prior to hitting the Process button, I usually choose the gear ‘Setting’ button to tune the document processing. JotNot cleans up documents differently for you depending on if you want a black and white vs color vs text image result. The resulting cleaned document can be redone if you don’t like the result. When correct and saved, the ‘scan’ is saved to the app’s launcher library area.

Directly from the final document or via JotNot’s library later, the files can be emailed, printed, faxed, saved to the iPhone’s photo library, saved to cloud services, sent to iTunes or opened in another app. Open-in is handy if you need to OCR the document, open it in Google Docs to let Google do the translation for you.