Digital camera + Xara = Document scanner

[feklee]

When away from my scanner at home, I figured that a compact camera plus Xara makes up a good tool to create document scans to PDF. While quality is lower than with a typical flatbed scanner, it is higher than with those smartphone scan apps. Furthermore, for better or worse, Xara gives more control.

1. Photograph your documents.
2. Create a new document with the physical dimensions of the scan.
   
3. Enable Snap to Objects, and add guides, to make the page border always visible.
   
4. Import bitmap in original resolution.
   
5. Orient and position the bitmap.
   
6. If necessary, adjust perspective distortion with the Mould tool. Afterwards, Convert to Editable Shapes and ungroup.
7. Switch to the photo tool. Crop the bitmap.
   
8. Adjust brightness levels.
   
9. Hide guides, then use the Eraser tool to remove unwanted dark spots.
   
10. Export to PDF. Given the quality and resolution of typical compact cameras, the High quality setting at 300dpi should be more than enough.
    

Suggestions for shooting:

• Set image quality to the highest level, but not to raw - unless you want to do additional steps.
• Zoom in, to avoid visible lens distortion and to avoid uneven brightness when using a flash.
• Adjust exposure so that white pages get rendered white.
• If scanning b/w documents, switch the camera to b/w mode. Depending on how the camera processes raw data to JPEG, this may result in higher sharpness than when doing the conversion from a color JPEG later.