Scan to PDF

Scanning on iPhone and iPad

Choose Scan from the library's New menu to open the built-in document camera. Point it at a page and Colophon detects the page's edges automatically, so you can capture a stack of pages in sequence without lining each one up by hand.

Scanning on Mac

A Mac has no camera pointed at your desk, so scanning uses Continuity Camera instead: choosing Scan opens the same document camera, driven by a nearby iPhone's camera, with the same automatic edge detection and multi-page capture.

After you scan

Each captured page is flattened and perspective-corrected automatically, and a text recognition pass runs immediately afterward so the page is searchable in your library from the moment it lands there. That page's text isn't selectable yet, though — for that, run Recognize Text (OCR) from the document's menu. See Make scans searchable with OCR for what that adds.

Scanning is also available as a Shortcuts and Siri action, so you can start a scan straight from the Home Screen or a voice command; see Shortcuts, Siri & Spotlight.