Scan to PDF (Free Document Scanner with OCR)

Turn physical documents into digital PDFs using your mobile device's camera. This scanner automatically detects document edges, straightens perspective distortion, enhances contrast and brightness, and saves everything as a high-quality PDF—all processed directly on your device with no cloud uploads. The built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature extracts text from scanned pages, making your documents searchable and editable. Perfect for scanning receipts, contracts, notes, whiteboards, business cards, invoices, forms, or any paper document you need to digitize quickly. Whether you're a student digitizing lecture notes, a professional archiving contracts, a traveler scanning receipts for expense reports, or anyone who needs to convert paper to PDF on the go, this tool provides enterprise-grade scanning with complete privacy. Unlike traditional scanner apps that upload your documents to cloud servers for processing, all scanning and OCR happens locally on your phone using Google's ML Kit technology. The scanner supports multi-page documents (up to 20 pages per session), allows importing images from your gallery for batch scanning, and automatically optimizes each page for readability. You can scan directly from the camera with real-time edge detection or choose existing photos to convert into professional PDFs. The OCR engine recognizes printed text in multiple languages and makes your scanned documents fully searchable, which is invaluable for finding specific information in large document archives. Scanned PDFs are saved to your device's Documents folder and can be immediately shared via email, uploaded to cloud storage, or opened in other apps. This scanner is ideal for going paperless, creating digital backups of important documents, preparing tax documents, archiving recipes, saving handwritten notes, scanning IDs and passports for travel, digitizing business cards with contact information extraction, converting old photos and letters to PDF, and countless other use cases where you need quick, reliable document digitization.

Tap Start Scanning to open the camera scanner.
Position your device over the document and let it auto-detect edges.
Capture multiple pages if needed (up to 20 pages).
Review and adjust the scanned pages, then save.
Download the PDF with extracted text for searching.

Related tools: Images to PDF, Extract Text, Compress PDF

FAQ

Is scanning private?

Yes, all document scanning and OCR processing happens directly on your mobile device using Google ML Kit. Your scanned documents never leave your phone and are not uploaded to any cloud servers. The scanner works completely offline after the initial ML Kit module download, ensuring complete privacy for sensitive documents like medical records, financial statements, or legal contracts.

What is OCR and how does it work?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that converts images of text into actual text data. After scanning a document, ML Kit analyzes the image to recognize letters, numbers, and words, then extracts them as searchable, selectable text. This makes your scanned PDFs searchable and allows you to copy text from scanned documents for editing or reuse.

How many pages can I scan?

You can scan up to 20 pages in a single scanning session. The scanner automatically combines all pages into one multi-page PDF document. If you need to scan more than 20 pages, simply start a new scan session and then use the Merge PDF tool to combine multiple scanned PDFs into one file.

Can I scan documents from my photo gallery?

Yes, the scanner allows you to import existing photos from your device's gallery. This is useful for batch processing multiple photos you've already taken or converting screenshots and images into PDF format. The scanner still applies edge detection and enhancement to gallery images for best results.

Does it work offline?

After the first use (which requires downloading Google's ML Kit scanning module), the scanner works completely offline. You can scan documents and extract text without any internet connection. The initial module download is around 10-20MB and only happens once. After that, everything runs locally on your device.

What quality are the scanned PDFs?

The scanner produces high-quality PDFs optimized for readability. ML Kit automatically enhances contrast, adjusts brightness, removes shadows, and corrects perspective distortion to ensure text is crisp and clear. The output quality is suitable for printing, archiving, or professional use. Each page is saved at a resolution that balances file size with visual quality.