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To be fair, scanning from a mobile device has almost zero discoverability. Few mobile OSes ship with a builtin "Scan" app in the same way that they all have a "Camera" app.

What modern societies need is a tax on feature non-discoverability; essentially providing a financial incentive for tech companies to ensure 100% of their features have meaningful uses for their users and that users can find these. At that point whatever details are economic will fall out w/o extended arguments of "what is right/best way to do X".



> Few mobile OSes ship with a builtin "Scan" app in the same way that they all have a "Camera" app.

Android[0] and iOS[1] both feature official apps (and in the case of iOS, the app is included in the default install) that can scan documents using the device's camera.

[0]: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/3145835?co=GENIE.Pla...

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210336


>Few mobile OSes ship with a builtin "Scan" app in the same way that they all have a "Camera" app.

What is the problem? I had many systems where you just send a picture to a email then to a server, there it got OCR'd and converted to a PDF(A) or whatever, then send back to the sender-email as attachment or link and archived.


If I emailed myself a JPEG from my phone I would absolutely have to look up the best way to convert it to a PDF. I don't know off the top of my head as I normally use a PDF scanning app.


In iOS Files app you can export an image to PDF by long pressing it and selecting Quick Actions > Export to PDF


Yeah it's not a manual thing (ABBYY FineReader Engine or FlexiCapture SDK) but at home i do it with pdfsandwich:

http://www.tobias-elze.de/pdfsandwich/


It's actually a bit odd thinking about it that it's not a common native phone function as capturing PDFs from paper is an incredibly common thing for people to need to do these days.




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