How to Use Your Smartphone to Scan Documents
Your smartphone , with its built-in camera, can help you take some extraordinary photos but the camera can also double as a pretty good flatbed scanner. It’s ideal for digitizing photos in albums, within frames or on a wall. But it also can convert paper business cards you’ve been collecting, documents you need to keep with you, notes on projects, receipts for expense reimbursement and even whiteboards on which you’ve been brainstorming. You then can store those images or send them to someone via email or text. A scan really means taking a photo, but the technology goes beyond that. Along with adding color correction to photos and magically repairing tears, some scanner apps include optical character recognition (OCR), which can translate typewritten and even handwritten words into editable and searchable text. When you scan a newspaper article without OCR, your smartphone saves the story as an image file, but you won’t be able to search...