A scanning app is essential for any attorney using an iPhone and/or iPad. By converting a physical document into a digital form, you can read it on a back lit screen and zoom in to see the fine print, annotate it, share it, store it, etc. Back in 2012, I tried out the scanner app sold by Readdle called Scanner Pro after I heard so many other lawyers rave about the app, and I was very impressed. Although I’ve tried out other scanning apps, Scanner Pro has been my go-to app for many years because it works so incredibly well. I use the app extensively in my law practice, but I use it frequently in my personal life as well. For example, whenever I get a product that has a manual, I scan the manual and put it into a special folder on my home computer. If I ever need the manual again, I know exactly where to look. And during the pandemic, my wife has used Scanner Pro to digitize all of the recipes that she clipped and saved from magazines and other sources — in some cases, back in the 1980s.
Because this app is so useful to me, when Readdle signed up to sponsor iPhone J.D. this month, I was the one who asked to make its Scanner Pro app the focus of this month's post. It just so turns out that this is a great month to mention the app because it was updated to version 8 on December 10, 2020. (I described the last big update, version 7, back in 2016.).
Here is why I find this app so useful, along with information on what is new in version 8. Note that I focus on the iPhone in this post because that is how I always use this app, but you can also use this app on an iPad.
Scanning
One of the things that I have always loved about Scanner Pro is how incredibly easy it is to turn a physical document into a digital scanned document. When you open the app, the app jumps right into scanning mode so you can immediately capture an image of the first page of the document. This makes it fast to start scanning. (You can turn off the Start with Camera feature in the Advanced Settings portion of the app, but I would never want to do so.) If you are already working in the app, you can start scanning by tapping the large plus sign at the bottom right corner of the app.
Hold your iPhone over the first page your document, and as soon as the app recognizes the four edges of the document, it will take the picture. You can turn off the Auto-Capture mode to put the app in manual mode, where you have to tap a button to take a picture, but it is much more convenient to keep Auto-Capture turned on.
Once the first page of a document is imaged, the app is ready to scan the second page and does so as soon as it sees the four corners. Then you can move on to the third page, etc. This process works well and is very fast. By simply letting the app take a look at each page of a document, the app scans the pages into a single PDF file. No need for you to tap any buttons between each page being scanned.
The quality of a scan created by Scanner Pro is excellent. Of course, you get best results if you scan a good version of a document when it has high-contrast around the edges (the document is against a surface with a different color) and the light is good. For example, a typical white letter-size sheet of paper is easy to scan against the darker background of a wooden table with overhead lights. But I’ve also had good luck with documents that are less than pristine. If a document is in very poor shape, such as crumbled up or folded, then I find that a flat-bed scanner works better because it can help to flatten the document. However, it is pretty rare for me to work with documents like that, so for virtually all of my other scanning needs, Scanner Pro works great.
Everything that I just wrote assumes that you are using an iPhone's camera to scan a physical document. However, you can also tap the photos icon at the bottom right of the scan screen to instead select an image on your camera roll and scan that image to create a PDF document.
Editing a scan
Once all of the pages have been scanned, tap the thumbnail of the document at the bottom right to work with the document. Using icons at the top of the screen you can see each page of the document and select specific pages to act upon them, plus you can use other features like add annotations to the document, set a password, or delete. But I rarely use those options and instead I find the five tools at the bottom to be the most useful.
Add - this lets you add one or more pages to the document. If I have a poor quality document, I will sometimes scan just the first page, make sure that I am satisfied with the results, and then go back and add the additional pages.
Search - this lets you search for text within the document. The app will tell you which pages of the document contain the word, and then when you view that page, you can see the word highlighted on the page.
Share - use this option to share the document.
Edit - tap this button to edit the scan. You can rotate the document, adjust each of the four corners of the document if the app didn’t do so correctly (which sometimes happens when you place a white document on a white table), change the document size (such as letter, legal, A4, etc.), change the color of the scan (color document, black and white document, photo, grayscale), adjust the brightness or contrast, and turn automatic warp correction on or off. The app does such a good job that I often don’t need to enter the edit mode (except to change my mind about whether I want a color or black and white scan), but it is nice to have this much control.
Note that you can also set the document to color/black and white/etc. when you are in the scan mode, which saves you the trouble of later adjusting this in the edit mode.
Text - this is a new feature in version 8. Tap this button and the app will show you just the text that is in the document, without any of the formatting. Scanner Pro performs an OCR on every document that you scan, and that is how it knows which words are on each page of a document. The quality of the OCR depends upon the original that you are scanning. In my law practice, where I am often working with black text on a white page, Scanner Pro does a great job with OCR, except that sometimes it gets confused when there is something like a clerk of court stamp on top of typed words. For other documents, the quality of the OCR depends upon the source, but even a document with the plain text of only most of the words is easier to work with than a document with none of the text recognized.
In the Text mode, you can copy all or some of the text and share the text elsewhere. For example, you can scan a contract and then copy a paragraph of that document to paste that text into a block quote section of a brief you are drafting in Microsoft Word.
Languages
Although I typically scan documents written in English, Scanner Pro is smart enough to detect a large number of languages. If you have the Latin-based languages option turned on, the app will automatically recognize English, Catalan, Danish, German, Dutch, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Filipino, and Turkish.
If you have Latin-based languages turned off, the app will recognize Czech, Chinese (Sim), Chinese (Tra), Greek, Estonian, Croatian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Saving
Another feature that makes Scanner Pro work so well for me is that you can control how files are automatically saved after they are scanned, such as automatically uploading to a Dropbox folder. Scanned files are also accessible within the Scanner Pro app itself, where you can sort them, organize them into folders, and display them either as large or small icons. The options for organizing and browsing your files within the app improved quite a bit with the update to version 8.
By default, the files are saved with a filename in the format of YYYY-MM-DD Scan, with numbers added after the word "Scan" as needed. That’s very convenient for me because I simply change the word "Scan" to a title that I want to use, change the date if necessary, and then the filename is in the format that I prefer.
Scanner Pro also has a sophisticated Workflow feature. You can use this to change how files are named, automate what happens when you scan a file, etc.
Price
For the prior versions of Scanner Pro, you paid when you downloaded the app. Version 8 changes that. Now, you can download the app for free to give you a chance to try it out, but some of the advanced features are disabled. For example, OCR is disabled in the free version, and a Scanner Pro watermark is added when you share a file. To unlock all of the features in the free version, the app now uses a $19.99/year subscription.
What if you paid for the app in the past — perhaps as long as eight years ago like me? You can update your app to version 8 and take advantage of all of the current version 8 features without paying anything more. And Readdle says that you can continue to use those current features for as long as you want. However, in the future, Readdle plans to add additional features to the app, and you will need to upgrade to a subscription if you want to take advantage of those additional features when they are added. It is nice that Readdle is so generous to its long-time users. At the same time, I look forward to seeing what Readdle has planned for future updates.
Here is what Readdle’s Chief Product Officer and co-founder Alex Tyagulsky said about upcoming features for Scanner Pro:
We’ve invested heavily into exploring how recent advancements in AI and machine learning, as well as new APIs and services from the likes of Google and Microsoft, can be harnessed within Scanner Pro to help make life easier for the people who use it. The first fruit of this work is already live in the form of a new shadow removal algorithm. But that’s just the beginning — improved border detection, automatic document categorization, and tagging are just around the corner, while new neural network-based OCR for Latin languages is being rolled out today.
Conclusion
Scanner Pro is a fantastic app. The app gives you a fast and convenient way to use the device that is already in my pocket to turn a physical document into a PDF document, with OCR performed and saved in the location that that you designate. The app has been around for so long that it already has a robust feature set, and the app should only get better now that Readdle is announcing plans to add new features in the future. Thank you to Readdle for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month and for giving me an excuse to talk about an app that is incredibly useful to lawyers and anyone else who works with documents.
Click here to get Scanner Pro (free with subscription available): 
