PDF Scan: Offline Scanner
Scan paper into clean PDFs with your phone camera: automatic page-edge detection, filters, on-device text recognition and an ID card mode. No account, nothing leaves your phone.
Key Features
Edges Found for You
The system scanner finds the page and straightens it. Prefer to do it yourself? Drag the four corners and the perspective is corrected.
Searchable PDFs
Text recognition runs on the phone, so you can select the text in a PDF and find any scan by the words inside it.
Stays on Your Phone
No account and no cloud. Scans, PDFs and recognised text leave the phone only when you share them.
About PDF Scan: Offline Scanner
PDF Scan turns receipts, contracts, forms, school notes and ID cards into PDF files with your phone camera. There are two ways to scan. Auto-detect opens the system document scanner (Google ML Kit on Android, Apple VisionKit on iPhone), which finds the edges of the page and straightens it for you. Scan manually when you would rather take the photo yourself, then drag the four corners onto the page and the app corrects the perspective. ID card mode puts the front and the back of a card on one A4 page. Add as many pages as you need, reorder or delete them, go back and re-edit any page, and add pages to a document you saved last week. Filters include Original, Magic Color, Grayscale, Black & White, Eco and Flatten, which evens out shadows and uneven light on a page that would not lie flat; intensity and sharpness are adjustable. Text recognition runs on the phone, so the PDFs it makes are searchable and their text can be selected, and the library search finds words inside your scans as well as document names. Share a document as a PDF or as JPEG images, or open the PDF in your phone's own viewer. There is no account and no cloud: scans, PDFs and recognised text are stored on the phone and leave it only when you share them. The interface is in 47 languages and follows your phone's language. PDF Scan is free with ads; a one-time purchase removes them.
Two ways to get the page in
Most of the time the fastest route is auto-detect. It opens the document scanner built into the phone — Google ML Kit on Android, Apple VisionKit on iPhone — which finds the edges of the sheet, crops to them and straightens the page before handing it back.
Sometimes you want to take the picture yourself: a page in a thick binder, a whiteboard, a form where the edges are not obvious. Manual scan uses the app's own camera. After the shot you drag the four corners onto the page, they snap to edges they can find, and the app corrects the perspective so a page photographed at an angle comes out rectangular. ID card mode is a two-step version of the same thing: front, then back, and both land on one A4 page, which is usually what an office or a bank asks for.
Making it readable
Filters run on the page before it becomes a PDF: Original, Magic Color, Grayscale, Black & White, Eco, and Flatten. Flatten is the one for pages that would not lie flat or were photographed under a single lamp. It estimates the shading across the page and divides it out, so a dark corner or the shadow of a curled edge stops swallowing the text. It does not straighten curved lines of text — that is a geometric problem, and pressing the page flat is still the cure. Intensity and sharpness can be adjusted, and pages can be rotated and cropped again.
A document can have as many pages as you like. Reorder them, delete one, re-edit any page, or come back later and add pages to a document you already saved. Share the result as a PDF or as JPEG images, or open the PDF in your phone's own viewer.
Text you can find, on a phone that keeps it
After a scan, text recognition runs on the phone and the recognised text is placed, invisibly, over each page of the PDF. The page still looks like the photo, but a PDF reader can search it and you can select a sentence and copy it. The same text feeds the library search, so typing a supplier name or an invoice number finds the scan it appears in.
None of this needs a connection. There is no account and no cloud storage; scans, PDFs and recognised text stay in the app's own folder on the phone and leave it only when you share them. PDF Scan is free and shows ads from Google AdMob — a banner under My Documents and, now and then, a full-screen ad after you save or share a PDF, never on the camera or editing screens. You can watch one short video for 24 hours without ads, or remove them with a one-time purchase. The PDF Scan privacy policy sets out what the app stores and what the ad SDK receives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are my scans uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no account and no cloud storage. Pages, PDFs and the text recognised in them are kept in the app's own folder on your phone, and edge detection and text recognition run on the phone too. A document leaves it only when you share it yourself.
Can I search the text inside a scan?
Yes. Text recognition runs on the device after a scan, and the PDF it produces carries that text, so you can select and search it in any PDF reader. The library search in the app matches words inside your scans as well as document names.
Does the Flatten filter straighten a curved book page?
No. Flatten evens out shadows and uneven light, which is what makes a curled page or a page photographed under a desk lamp hard to read. It does not bend curved lines of text back into straight ones. Pressing the page flat before you scan still gives the best result.
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