Scan to PDF

Photograph a document with your phone and get a clean, readable PDF.

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About this tool

A phone photo of a document is not a scan. It is dim, the paper looks grey, and the file is several megabytes of camera noise. Send it to an office and you will often be asked to send it again properly.

High-contrast mode fixes that: it pushes near-white paper to actual white and near-black ink to actual black, which is what a flatbed scanner does. The result reads cleanly, prints properly and is a fraction of the size. Greyscale is the gentler option when the page has photographs or a stamp you want to keep.

How to scan to pdf

  1. Photograph each page with your phone, in the best light you can find.
  2. Add the photos here in page order.
  3. Choose High contrast for plain text, or Greyscale if the pages have photos or stamps.
  4. Select Create PDF to build the scan.

Common questions

How do I get a good result?

Shoot in even daylight if you can, keep the phone parallel to the page rather than at an angle, and fill the frame with the paper. Avoid a hard shadow across the page — high-contrast mode will turn a shadow into a grey band.

What does high contrast actually do?

It converts each page to grey, then pushes light pixels to white and dark pixels to black with a smooth transition between. Paper texture and colour cast disappear and only the ink remains.

Does this make the text searchable?

No. The output is images of your pages. Searchable text needs OCR, which Doxly does not do yet.

Is the photo uploaded anywhere?

No. The images are processed in the browser on your phone and the PDF is assembled there too.

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