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iPhone pictures of documents become scans to share

There is a couple apps from the developers of Readdle that I use. The Calendar app does a very nice job of pulling all of my different calendars into a manageable view yet allows me to quickly switch between work and personal. If you work with Google Calendars at all, Google Calendar Client helps with it’s many views.

The other app is the Readdle’s Scanner Pro. The universal app allows for the ‘scanning’ of documents so I don’t have to carry paper around and it’s easier to share with people not in the room.

No matter how ‘paper free’ an office gets, printed pages still work their way into meetings. Then I end up with a stack of paper on the edge of the desk, then it grows, then it gets tipped over, then someone asks me for a copy that used to be half way down the stack right where I left it, now… who knows. So, I started taking pictures of documents. There are a few apps that claim to help with the ‘scanning’ process, each with their own special features. Scanner Pro has been one that I didn’t jump on board with till this week, no particular reason, I thought I had documents covered.

The difference of snapping a picture of a document with your iPhone and using a ‘scanner’ app is that the apps usually offer corner ID, contrast and built in sharing. With Scanner Pro, you also get the ability to save to cloud storage/share services and joining multiple page into one document. Being able to re-order the pages in that grouping is something many of the other options seem to miss that is important, I can’t always take pictures of documents in the exact order that I need to share with others in.

Lots of fine tuning options including which cloud service your using.

Grids for alignment can be turned on/off. It is more important to get the document straight along one edge than trying to take the image so that it at a perfect straight on. Scanner Pro offers clean up for an angle image but not a slightly twisted one.

Drag the corners of the alignment square to match up to the corners of the document. Scanner Pro then shifts the image to be straightened. This is important since you will almost never get a perfect straight on shot. Without the feature, you get areas of the document with smaller and squished text than other areas.

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