Document Scanning via your cell phone? July 6, 2009
Posted by carolhagen in Construction Industry - Software, Construction Industry Hardware, Document Imaging.trackback
Some of us have tried to take a picture of a document with our cell phone but the results vary widely. Why? Because you are using a cell phone camera that is missing instructions on how to make the photo into a document!
Here’s a hot solution called Norfello’s Docscanner™. It’s a snap with DocScanner™ in 4 easy steps:
- Take a photo of the document with the application.
- Check the edges or have it automatically determine the edges of the document and prompts for the result(provided that your background is darker than the paper). You’ll need to decide on the quality and size of the document.
- DocScanner™ will then automatically correct the keystones. No need for manual rotating, cropping or scaling.
- The document is now ready for sending via e-mail as a PDF-file or you can save it to the photo album.
There are other options for selecting colormode (color/grayscale), brightness, contrast, and even a multi-page setting.
Docscanner™ works on the Apple iPhone and will make collecting expense receipts and other documents a breeze. Here are a few images available on the DocScanner™ website that show you what it looks like when using the iPhone. Best of all this iPhone app costs just $9.99.
Now you have the PDF but need to make it a searchable PDF. I need to review or reword this contract, check for spelling, or publish this docuument to the web. Then you’ll want ABBYY’s FineReader that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to make the document searchable for you. The corporate & site license editions of FineReader have Hot Folder & Scheduling with mailbox watching so by just emailing it, the OCR can be done on every document in an email inbox or a particular folder. These documents can be converted to editable formats like Word & Excel. It can retain the table structure of spreadsheets (including multi-page tables) and keep bullets and numbered lists in their original styles. The flexibility in FineReader has many other applications including
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Digitizing and Archiving Documents
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Extracting and Editing Numeric and Financial Data
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Compiling Information for Presentations, Research Reports, and Proposals
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Preparing Documents for Translation
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Updating Marketing and Sales Materials
- Publishing Web Site Content
Is it time to upgrade your company cell phones or just enhance your current document imaging system?
Carol's Construction Technology Blog 
And since you all don’t want to switch carriers (to AT&T) to get the iPhone, perhaps the government will step, in per this article:
http://albuquerque.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/stories/2009/07/06/daily18.html?ed=2009-07-07&ana=e_du_pub
[…] Want to capture expenses easily … so easy an executive will do it himself? Jotnot turns your iPhone into a scanner and with the Evernote integration you start cooking! Categorizing your text notes, voice recordings, and snapshots, you can organize notes into notebooks, add tags, search and more. You can capture text, webpages, voice recordings and your tweets too. There’s more coming per their blog with the beta 3.5 new release. Things like auto spell checking, faster searches, map views are on their way. The combination of these two apps usurps an earlier blog entry I made on iPhone scanner apps. […]
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