DocScanner: A Powerful Photocopier in Your Pocket [iOS]

The DocScanner iOS app is like having a photocopier in your pocket. Back in the analogue days, photocopiers were useful tools for business and pleasure, copying important documents or scanning photos for making artfully degraded cut-up concert posters.

It’s true you can simply photograph artwork and items for use on your Desktop, but apps like DocScanner do other things that copiers are also good at, like making documents and photos black and white in one pass.

In this article, we look at DocScanner and specifically the ways we could use it to be creative or productive on a Desktop computer.

Saving Space and Paperwork

DocScanner is more than just a photocopier because it’s harnessed to the Internet. If you have a Dropbox account (and if you don’t, you really should) you can link it so that everything you copy with DocScanner gets sent automatically to your Dropbox in the cloud.

This in itself is an excellent productivity enhancement for daily tasks, scanning all your snail mail and then recycling it, for example. Reducing all your paperwork to PDFs with one click is very efficient, and once captured in this way, you can read them and print them out on your PC later on.

You can do the same with other paper: business cards, receipts you get from shops, compliments slips and shipping labels from deliveries, bus and train tickets in case you lose them, and ATM receipts. All of them will be securely backed up to your PC at home via Dropbox in case of any disputes, and you save filing space. Plus even when you delete them from your iOS device they stay backed up in the cloud.

Make PDFs

There are many applications on the Desktop which allow you to create multi-page PDFs, but those rely on the pages being digital files in the first place. What if you want a PDF of a book or a section of one as a file you can read on your computer? What if the book you want to read later is in a library and you can’t take it home?

It’s easy, you just scan it and make a multi-page PDF to read later.

To make a multi-page PDF, simply scan a page, then click the add page button and add as many pages as you like. When you are done, name the file and press Save, and the file will be sent to your Dropbox. From there you can read it on the PC, email it to someone, or send it to an ebook device.

Make Copier Art

One of the things which DocScanner is good at which a Desktop can’t do without additional software is that weird retro burned out photocopy look where any large black areas are turned to white to save toner.

If you make retro art, this is a great one-shot way to get a great starting point for pasteup or retro artworks.

Similarly, it’s a great way to scan doodles for development in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Also any scans which use the adaptive shading are totally black and white with no greys. This means even if you only have a black and white printer, you can use websites like The Rasterbator to make huge multi-page posters you can print out and paste onto your walls.

Sharing the Love

Within DocScanner, you can copy and send articles in magazines to friends. You can also send quotes from books you are reading to Facebook. Using the cropping tools, you can centre in on the quote you want to feature and the app handles the cropping.

If Dropbox is linked, it also sends a version to Dropbox, and although you can send it directly from the DocScanner app to Facebook, you also have the option of dragging it in from DropBox into Photoshop and then adding it to Facebook in a browser. This is handy if you want to edit the file to highlight certain words.