Sometimes , you ask to turn a piece of newspaper into a digital filing cabinet . Maybe you need to let in a reception , registration , or other form of proof in an on-line flesh . Or , you need to keep copies of your important documents in the cloud , so they ’re always accessible and safe from being drop off or destroy . Such document are often digitized as Portable Document Format files ( or PDFs ) .

It used to be that you needed to use either consecrate hardware or a third - party iPhone app   to take a photo of a papers and commute it to PDF . That is no longer the showcase : Apple includes a very ready to hand papers scanner in the iPhone ’s Notes and Files apps , and it does a amazingly good job of capture most documents and convert them to PDF . Because it ’s not very obvious , you ’d be forgiven for not even knowing it exist .

Here ’s how you scan papers using an iPhone . We also cover how to convert the scan into a PDF and how to autofill the PDF on an iPhone .

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How to scan a document on iPhone using Notes

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How to turn a scan into a PDF on iPhone

The method above allows you to scan a document into Notes , which is utile if you want to store your scans in Notes . But what if you ’d rather store it as a PDF ?

Luckily if you save the scan it will mechanically keep as a PDF .

This will save the scan as a PDF .

iPhone scan documents 1

How to scan a PDF on iPhone

You do n’t have to preserve your scan in Notes , you may also scan directly into Files , where your document will mechanically be save as a PDF .

How to fill in a PDF on iPhone

Now that you have your PDF scanned onto your iPhone it is loose to fill it in . In fact , your iPhone can even apply AutoFill to complete some portion of the PDF .

You might discover it easier to fill in a PDF on a Mac , read : How to delete a PDF on Mac .

How to save iPhone scan as PDF

iPhone scan documents

Editing a PDF on iPhone