October 19, 2010
Introducing Page Scanner(2) - How to Make High Quality PDF

We are going to create a PDF file from three scanned pages. These pages are scanned under different lighting conditions with iPhone 3Gs or iPhone 4. Start with the original pages, as shown below: These pages are quite different in terms of lighting, perspective. Fortunately, Page scanner is extremely good at making pages clear. For example, This function is called Black&White, also known as image binarization. To do it, just press the icon inside dashed red line.  Normally, page scanner doesn't ask for contrast tuning, just one click will do.  However, for some special cases, it will need your guidance. We will revisit this issue at the end of this story. But remember you just click once, subsequent click will make the result worse. The Scissor icon means cut. We need to cut off the unnecessary parts, to correct perspective, and to rotate if necessary.  The Disk icon means save. After all you have done, you need to save it. Tap on the scissor icon to bring up the tailor view, and then move the four points to correct corners. Look at the wheel in the center,  if you move your finger around it, the image will rotate as your finger moves.  After you're ready, tap at the done button at the right top, and your tailor work is done. Don't remember to save before you quit to the spiral notebook! Now that you have the pages cleaned up, you can just go ahead and make the PDF. Tap the "Page Tile" icon, a popup action sheet will show: It is very straight forward.  Now that you can send the PDF via email. Or you can access it via iTunes file sharing.  We provide the PDF file in case you want to have a look. Sounds pretty easy. Oh, we're not done yet. There is one more thing:-) Sometimes your pages contains photos and illustrations, and if the photos turn out dirty after black&white, then you can try to tune it to look better: As indicated above, change the source picture contrast to higher will generally make the page cleaner but at the cost of losing more details. You can try it for yourself. And you only have to do it once for one session of scanning. Because it is highly related to the circumstance you're currently working in. The last thing is, you can set the image quality from Medium to High if you want higher resolution pages (for printing), but at the cost of larger file size.