With real estate being my day job, I regularly get a lot of paper files and these files typically end up crumpled at the bottom of my bag unless I immediately do something with them. Therefore I try to scan things with my iPhone as I get them. I use ABBY Business Card reader for all business cards, and had been using JotNot Pro for all other documents.
JotNot works really well, and quickly. However, as you may know, Smile Software recently launched [PDFpen Scan+][1] — a new iOS app for scanning. The biggest feature it offers is the ability to do OCR conversion on your iOS device. That sounded killer, so I immediately bought the app.
In my testing, Smile’s Scan+ is *mostly* better than JotNot. The biggest point in JotNot’s favor is how cropping is handled. With JotNot the auto-edge-detection is much better. Even more in JotNot’s favor is that manually adjusting the corners brings up a nice magnifying glass making things easy and fast. With Smile’s Scan+ I would recommend not even wasting your time trying to adjust the edges — it’s that difficult. This is the only point not in Scan+’s favor.
As for the final file output? Smile wins hands down. Scan+ leaves you with a better PDF image and accurate OCR of the document. There’s little to no good reason to recommend anything but Scan+ right now for iOS scanning — great app.
For those that want to see a comparison, I took a printed page and scanned the page in each app — adjusting the image as best I could within each app. Here’s the result from [JotNot Pro][2], and here’s the result from [PDFpen Scan+][3]. It’s important to note that Scan+ has a much larger file size, but it also looks better and has OCR (OCR is not required).
Now that you can see the massive difference I suspect you want the link to buy Scan+. [PDFpen Scan+ is $4.99 in the App Store][4].
[1]: http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/Scan/index.html
[2]: https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/File-03-10-2013-10-38-58.pdf
[3]: https://f3a98a5aca88d28ed629-2f664c0697d743fb9a738111ab4002bd.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/scanplus.pdf
[4]: http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/Scan/index.html
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