Most of us probably don’t have a scanner at home, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to share your paper documents with others. We have compiled some instructions on how to use the Adobe Scan app to easily capture, crop, OCR, and generate PDFs to quickly share.
Option 1: Scan documents using Adobe Scan on your phone (easiest option)
- Download Adobe Scan from your device’s app store.
- Launch the application and at the bottom of the screen, click “Sign In or Sign Up”.
- Type in Clemson email address and it should take you to Single Sign On for Clemson.
- Allow access to your phone’s camera.
- The software will begin to detect the edges of the page, which you can adjust with your finger.
- Take picture when ready and then tap the image it saves.
- To eliminate shadows, make sure your light source is in front of you and your phone, not directly above or behind (think of how the sun creates shadows).
- You can crop, rotate, or make other visual adjustments.
- Give the file a relevant name by clicking the pencil icon and then click save.
- Adobe Scan automatically recognizes the text in the image to make it text searchable.
- This should save the file in your Adobe Creative Cloud. You can also save the new PDF to your phone or share it via email or a link.
Note: Change the app’s settings to not use cell/mobile data if you do not have unlimited data plan. The PDFs it creates are very small and likely not going to use up much data, but it’s best to be on the safe side.
Option 2: Take pictures using your phone’s camera and convert to PDF on computer
- Take picture when ready and the tap the image it saves.
- To eliminate shadows, make sure your light source is in front of the phone, not directly above or behind (think of how the sun creates shadows).
- Download image to computer
- Connect phone to your computer to download the image; or
- Email image to yourself and download it to your computer; or
- Download the image from your phone’s cloud photo storage (Google Photos or iCloud).
- Open Adobe Acrobat DC
- Click Tools tab and find Create PDF, then click the Open option for that tool
- You can either select Single File or Multiple Files depending on how many photos you captured
- For Single File – drag and drop your image into Adobe or click Create button and import photo using the file navigation popup.
- For Multiple Files –
- Choose Combine Files and then Next.
- Click Add Files and select all of the files using the file navigation popup and click Open.
- Reorder them if necessary and then click Combine in the top right.
- Once PDF is created, go to Tools tab and select the Scan & OCR tool.
- At the top, click Recognize Text and then select In This File.
- Click new Recognize Text button that appears.
- This step might take a minute.
- Go to File and click Save.
- Name the file appropriately and feel free to share.