Thursday, June 1, 2017

Adobe Scan

Juli Clover:

Unlike most OCR apps on the market, Adobe Scan is free to use, with no watermarks or page limits, and it's optimized for capturing multi-page documents.

The app works by capturing a picture of what a user wants to scan, from notes and forms to receipts and business cards. Adobe Scan detects the edges of a document, captures and cleans the image, fixes perspective, removes shadows, and then uses image recognition to detect and convert printed text.

I tried it and found it OK. The OCR works pretty well, and the capturing interface is streamlined. As with Dropbox, it creates much larger PDF files than my ScanSnap. It supports iOS share extensions, but before you can share a newly created PDF you have to save it to Adobe Document Cloud. I’ve tried a lot of these apps, but in practice I find myself waiting until I have access to my ScanSnap or just using the built-in Camera app.

Previously: iPhone Scanning/OCR Apps.

See also: Scanbot, Scanner Pro.

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Agreed - I still use an old version of Acrobat because it produces *so much smaller* PDFs than anything else I've tried. I actually have it postprocess files to reduce file size (via a script I run from EagleFiler: https://github.com/nriley/scan/blob/master/update_dates_in_place.py).

Unfortunately I don't have a ScanSnap myself but my family does. At least in the old version we're using, the main issue with ScanSnap is how slow the ABBYY OCR software is to launch and to process files.

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