Adobe Scan
Makes great PDFs with character recognition
Free From Adobe, adobe.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 10.0 or later
Adobe Scan is yet another app that uses your device’s camera to capture images of documents and turn them into PDFs. But it justifies its existence by making great PDFs fast, with free and automatic optical character recognition – so you can search for text in them and copy and paste that content elsewhere.
Auto-Capture does a wonderful job even in low light, highlighting your document in blue so you can confirm it’s looking at the right thing. Or you can turn off Auto-Capture to scan manually, and even create PDFs from images already in your photo library.
By default, Scan saves your data to the Adobe Document Cloud, which includes 2GB of storage for free accounts. But you can also use the Share option to send the scanned PDFs to other apps, including Mail, Messages, Dropbox, and Documents.
You can’t do any PDF editing or markup inside Scan, however. You need Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader app for iOS (or another PDF app) to annotate and sign your PDFs, but they show up there seamlessly via Document Cloud, and ready to be searched, marked up, commented on, and highlighted.
Both Scan and Acrobat Reader include an optional in-app purchase called PDF Pack, which, for $9.99 a month, lets you combine PDFs and convert them to editable Microsft Office documents or images. But otherwise Adobe Scan delivers without costing a penny.
The bottom line. Adobe Scan works fast and produces solid results for free.