Once upon a time most people’s houses boasted a scanner as part of their PC setup. Didn’t take up too much space and helped organize your high school or college notes and save all kinds of ID docs for the family members. These days scanners are less ubiquitous but that doesn’t mean the need to scan documents is. CamScanner – PDF Creator, as its name indicates, is a free app for Android to do scans. And it comes with OCR support, to boot.
CamScanner works in a simple way. You just need the doc to be scanned and some good illumination to get a decent-quality result. The process, as mentioned, is quite easy and you just have to follow these steps: first, you capture the doc, then tap to set the dimensions of the capture box, then apply a filter to get the most legible result, and finally just save the doc as a PDF. People who have tried out Photoscan will find lots of similarities with that process.
The main appeal of this app is its OCR support, meaning if you capture printed text, the app can process it and convert it into an unformatted plain text document to edit as needed. Obviously it can’t recognize handwritten text, or at least not well enough to rely on as a matter of course.
Oddly, CamScanner can also share your scanned documents over your social networks. Still, not all the features in this tool are open, with access given according to three tiers of user: those that register, those that don’t, and Premium users. Between the first two tiers there’s not too dramatic of a contrast: if you register you can do faster searches of your docs, comment on group scans, and sync PDF files between your devices. The Premium version lets you convert PDF to text, which is a tricky thing to do with standard PDF readers.
CamScanner is one of the most popular doc scanning apps out there – and with good reason. With it no document, print or not, will withstand your new digitizing superpowers. Still, though, make sure there’s enough light around you.
CamScanner – PDF Creator for Android on Uptodown [APK] | Download
