Scan the pages of a book to PDF
A chapter for a seminar, the twelve pages you need from a library book, a cookbook recipe: this page opens the scanner with the Grayscale filter, which keeps the halftone illustrations and the tone of the paper readable while dropping the yellow cast, and lets you photograph the pages one by one, in order, into one PDF made in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the pages stay on this device between sessions, so a long book can be scanned in several sittings.
Scan a document
Use the camera or choose photos of documents (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC). Everything stays on this device.
One page per picture, straight above it
Book pages are the case where the corners deserve a look: the inner edge disappears into the binding and the detector sometimes picks the edge of the facing page. Open the page, drag the corner with the magnifier onto the real corner of the page, and the rest follows. Tick Searchable text (OCR) before saving if you want to search the chapter later.
What the tool does not do yet: straighten the curve of a page near the binding (dewarping) or split a photo of two facing pages into two pages. Press the book flat and photograph one page at a time.
Tips
- Photograph one page per picture, the phone parallel to the page, with the spine pressed down by your other hand outside the page area.
- Run Check pages before saving: pages photographed with the phone the other way round are proposed for rotation, and nothing is rotated until you confirm.
- Text-only pages can go to Black & white per page for a much smaller file; keep Grayscale on pages with photographs.
- Choose the OCR language of the book, not of your phone, and a second language if the book quotes in another one.
- Save the PDF at the end of each chapter, keep scanning with Scan more, and join the parts with Merge PDF; up to 100 pages fit in one scan.
Why it is private
Everything you type or drop here is handled by your browser, on your device. Nothing is uploaded. To verify, open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and use the tool: you will see no request carrying your data.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I photograph two facing pages at once?
- You can, but they become one wide page: the tool does not split the spread into two pages yet. One page per picture gives a better result and a readable order.
- The text near the binding is curved. Can the tool flatten it?
- Not yet. Pressing the book flatter and photographing from directly above reduces the curve; dewarping is being built.
- Does the OCR understand the layout of a book page?
- It reads the text in reading order and lays it invisibly over the picture, so searching and copying work; columns and footnotes come out as plain text, not as a layout.