The best scanner apps for iOS

For people who have paper to turn into PDF files

With Adobe Scan, you can turn almost anything made of paper into PDF. Receipts, notes, photos, documents, business cards, whiteboards, whatever. You scan your paper document, turn on text recognition if you want, and enjoy a beautiful PDF that you can edit, crop, rotate, and adjust color. The built-in optical character recognition engine lets you reuse scanned content by creating a high-quality PDF that you can work with in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and you can save your scans to Adobe Document Cloud for easy sharing. The main downside is that if you want to turn other things other than text into PDF files, you have to pay for a PDF pack subscription.

Why we love it

This app works great for scanning text into a searchable PDF. It allows you to quickly and easily import your paper receipts, business cards, and other documents into Adobe Document Cloud. You can take just about any paper document and make it digital. This mountain of receipts can turn into a digital library in no time. I just wish Adobe Scan didn’t require you to make an in-app purchase to turn more than just text into PDF files. Then again, the Adobe Document Cloud integration makes the app quite unique and works well when you frequently (or not so often) use other Adobe apps.