Scanned documents

A scanned document is a set of pictures of paper pages saved as a PDF. On screen it looks like any other file, but to your computer each page is one image. That is why scans behave differently from PDFs made in Word or saved from a website: they are often large, pages can come out crooked, upside down or in the wrong order, and the words can't be selected, copied or edited.

The guides below cover the problems that come up most often: turning phone photos of documents into one tidy PDF for an online application, fixing a scan with blank backs and sideways pages, and understanding why the text in a scan can't be changed and what you can still do with the file.

Each guide points to the free tools that do the job, such as JPG to PDF, Rotate PDF, Remove blank pages and Compress PDF for files too large to send. They all work in your browser, so your scans never leave your device. PDFSahl does not offer text recognition (OCR), and the guides say so wherever it matters.