Documents
Scanned document to editable
A scan carries no text, only a picture of text, so everything depends on how good the picture is. This page is about the difference between a scan that rebuilds cleanly and one that costs you an afternoon.
Quality is the whole story
A 300 dpi scan of a printed original rebuilds almost completely. A photocopy of a photocopy loses thin rules and small print, which is where footnotes, footers and table borders live. A page fed through a scanner at an angle is the worst case, because skew makes columns drift into each other and a table can come back as scrambled rows.
Stamps, signatures and handwriting
A received stamp, a wet signature or a handwritten margin note is a mark on the image, not content. Say in the prompt that they should be ignored, otherwise a stamp sitting across a heading can confuse the read of that heading. A signature is best rebuilt as a proper signature block rather than carried across as a picture.
Fix the source before you fix the output
If the scan is poor and the paper original still exists, rescan it flat at 300 dpi. Ten minutes at the scanner beats an hour repairing forty blocks, and the result is better in every case. If only a bad copy exists, expect to check tables and any small print by eye against the paper.
Rebuild, then improve
Old scanned documents usually carry decades of accumulated structure: numbering that restarts halfway, three heading styles doing the same job, a table that exists because the typewriter could not indent. Once it is editable, that is worth cleaning up. The rebuild is the moment those choices are cheapest to change.
How it works, in three steps
Step 1
Scan flat at 300 dpi
One multi page PDF, square to the glass, no skew.
Step 2
Name what to ignore
Stamps, signatures and margin notes are marks on the image, not content.
Step 3
Check tables and small print
Those are the two things a scan loses first.
The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Turn a PDF or photo into an editable document.
Limits worth knowing
- A scan is read as an image, so accuracy depends on the scan.
- Skew, stamps and photocopy loss all cost fidelity.
- Handwriting is not read as content.
- Attaching files is a paid plan feature.
See it on a finished piece
Questions people ask
What resolution should I scan at?
Around 300 dpi for text. Higher mostly costs file size, and the cap is 10 MB per file.
What happens to a stamp or a signature on the page?
They are marks on the image, not content. Say in the prompt to ignore them, and rebuild a signature as a proper signature block.
My scan is a poor photocopy. Is it worth trying?
Try it, but expect to check tables and small print by eye. If the paper original exists, rescanning it is faster than repairing the output.
Make your own document
The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match yours, generate, then edit anything you like.
Create a document with OneCraftRelated pages
Photo of a document to editable
A document that only exists on paper is a document nobody can update. A phone photo is enough to get the words back into something editable, and the whole job is making sure the words survive the trip.
Scanned form to a digital form
A multi page scan is the hardest input and the most common one. The pages become sections, repeated blocks become a single table field, and scan quality decides how much of that lands right the first time.
Photo of a form to a digital form
You do not need a scanner. A phone photo of a printed form is enough to rebuild it online, as long as the shot is flat, square on and evenly lit. This page is about getting that shot right, because it decides how much editing you do afterwards.
More finished work of this kind is on the document examples hub.