Adobe Scan turns documents into editable PDFs

Adobe has launched a new way to turn your physical documents into PDFs with editable text, and it's completely free. The company has released a new mobile app simply called "Scan" for both iOS and Android, and to create a digital copy of a document, you merely have to point your phone's camera at it. There are loads of other scanner apps, out there, including Office Lens -- even Google Drive has a built-in scanning feature for Android devices. This app, however, is perfect if you use Adobe's apps extensively. It automatically uploads your scans to Adobe Document Cloud, so you can access them on any computer, phone or tablet.

You can edit your files on Adobe Acrobat, but you'll have to pay for Acrobat Pro DC to be able to edit digitized text and to generally be able to tweak documents to your heart's content. If you're just after a scanner app, you don't have to worry about that. But if you need the extra features to be able to edit scanned PDFs for work or school, you'll have to pay $15 per month.

Scan is far from perfect at this point, based on a few trial runs we did: it still has a hard time recognizing documents, and it tends to cut off printed text boxes or tables. It does work, though, and in case the scan isn't perfect, you can always rotate it and do some other minor alterations before saving it as a PDF.