How to Scan Documents to PDF Using Your Phone
Phone cameras are now sharper than most flatbed scanners from 10 years ago. The hard part isn't capturing — it's assembling the captured photos into a proper PDF document for submission, filing, or emailing. PDFPuddle handles that step in seconds.
Best practices for phone scanning
Strong, even lighting (natural light from a window beats overhead fluorescent). Plain dark background to maximize contrast. Phone perpendicular to the document — tilted angles distort text and confuse OCR. Use a rest or table to avoid camera shake. For multi-page scans, capture all pages first, then assemble — don't try to do them one at a time in PDFPuddle.
Cropping and cleanup
Many phones have a built-in 'document scanner' mode (iPhone Notes app, Google Drive scan feature) that auto-crops to the document edges and corrects perspective. Use those if available — the result is much cleaner than raw photos. Otherwise, crop in your phone's photo editor before uploading.
How to assemble in PDFPuddle
Open Scan to PDF, drop in all your scanned images at once, choose page size (Fit to Image is usually right), click Create Scanned PDF. The images become a multi-page PDF in the order you uploaded them. Reorder by dragging cards before processing.
Making scanned PDFs searchable
After creating the PDF, run it through OCR PDF to extract any text the original images contained. For pure photo scans (no embedded text), use a dedicated OCR engine first to embed a text layer, then assemble.