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.
- Photograph your documents.
- Create a new document with the physical dimensions of the scan.
- Enable Snap to Objects, and add guides, to make the page border always visible.
- Import bitmap in original resolution.
- Orient and position the bitmap.
- If necessary, adjust perspective distortion with the Mould tool. Afterwards, Convert to Editable Shapes and ungroup.
- Switch to the photo tool. Crop the bitmap.
- Adjust brightness levels.
- Hide guides, then use the Eraser tool to remove unwanted dark spots.
- 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.
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