# How to scan a document to PDF on Android

Open Scan Clan, point the camera at the page, and let it find the edges. It straightens the photo, evens out the lighting, and gives you a PDF you can send. The whole thing takes about fifteen seconds per page.

## Step by step

### 1. Open the camera

Tap the scan button. The viewfinder tracks the page while you frame it, so you do not have to line the shot up squarely — a hand-held photo taken at an angle still comes out flat.

### 2. Take the shot

Tap the shutter, or turn on auto-capture and let it fire when the page is steady. Keep shooting to add more pages; they stack into one document.

### 3. Crop if you need to

The corners are draggable, so you can pull the crop in or out. Rotating in quarter turns, reordering pages and deleting one mid-edit are all here too.

### 4. Pick a filter

Magic Color keeps the colour and whitens the paper. Black and White is the most readable for text. No Shadow and Glare Removal deal with bad lighting. Any page can be reverted to the original photo — editing never destroys the shot.

### 5. Save it

The document is saved as a PDF and appears in your library. From there you can share it to any app, print it, save it to your gallery, or download it.

## Getting a cleaner scan

Light the page from the side rather than head-on. A lamp directly above a glossy page bounces straight back into the lens, and that white blown-out patch is glare — no filter can recover detail that the sensor never captured.

Put the page on a surface that contrasts with it. Edge detection is looking for the boundary between paper and background, and white paper on a white table is the one case that gives it nothing to find.

If the page is stapled or bound and will not lie flat, photograph it in two halves and crop each one. Two flat pages read better than one curved one.

## Making the text searchable

Text recognition runs on the device, so the scan is not uploaded in order to be read. It pulls the words off the page so you can copy them, names new scans after the text on the page, and lets you search your library by what is written inside a document rather than only by its filename.

See also: [how to sign a PDF on your phone](/guides/sign-a-pdf-on-your-phone/) and [how to compress a PDF](/guides/compress-a-pdf-to-under-1mb/).

> Scan Clan is free, and every step below is part of the app — there is no paid tier to move any of it into. [Get it on Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spirikle.scanclan).

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_Scan Clan · https://spirikle.com/guides/scan-documents-to-pdf-on-android/ · published by Spirikle · support@spirikle.com_