Document Scanner Help

Document Scanner - Help/Support

Welcome to our support page

Our goal is to make installing and using our applications as easy as possible. If you don't find the answers you are looking for, please send us an email.

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Initial Setup Help

There is no special setup required

Usage Help & FAQ

Basic Operation

To start with, one creates a "document" that is a collection of different pictures. These pictures may be taken with the camera, or you can insert a preexisting JPEG image from your collection. Once you have one or more images, you can select "Make PDF" to create the actual PDF file. In addition to these simple operations, once you have selected a document, you can also:

  • Insert an existing JPEG image (at the end of the document)
  • Reorder images
  • Delete the current image
  • Rotate the current image
  • Do Perspective Correction & Cropping

When you are in the document list, you can long-press a document name and then:

  • Delete the document
  • Rename the document
  • Edit the document (to add new images, etc)

After you have completed making a document ("Make PDF"), you are taken to a menu that lets you:

  • Copy the document to the root of the SD card or to another folder
  • Upload the document to Sky Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, SugarSync and to a number of other cloud services
  • Email the document
  • Upload the document to your Google Docs account
  • Upload the document to your Google Docs account with OCR (experimental capability)

Perspective Correction/ Image Enhancement

To correct the perspective, please choose the 4 corners either with touch or using the track-ball and select next. You then have the choice of converting to greyscale or black/white. There is also an option to automatically start the perspective correction after a picture is taken with the camera.

Using Google Apps account for Google Docs Upload

Please do the following to sign in to your Google Apps account:

  1. Go to options and clear any Google Docs tokens by going to Document Scanner Options->"Clear Google Docs Authentication".
  2. After you "Make PDF" and select "Upload to Google Docs". You will now get the login screen for signing into Google Docs. After email/password fields, there is a button "Sign In", and then a link "Sign Up". Right under than link there is (in very small font) a link "Sign in with a Google Apps Account"
  3. Click on "Sign in with a Google Apps Account" and it will then ask you for you Google Apps email address (e.g. randywore@teenchallenge.net if that is your Google Apps email address). You will then be taken to your Google Apps account where you will be asked to enter your password.
  4. You will now be asked if you want to grant access to the Document Scanner application. Please say "Grant Access"
  5. Now it should start uploading and you should see the status in the notification bar.

Special Note on Emailing

The default compression options create files that may be too large for mailing if you have many pages. Please consider changing the default compression (see configuration options below).

Printing

You can print to a number of Google Cloud printers using two free third party applications: CloudPrint or Breezy.

  • Since we take a high-resolution image, please make sure your PDF printer is set to "Fit to Printable Area" to get the right page size. Due to variety of page sizes, we do not reduce the image quality to fit paper size.

Image Quality and PDF Document Size Considerations

Through extensive testing, we have found that the biggest determinant of PDF image quality is the original image from the camera.

With respect to compression, there is a difference of about 4:1 in the document size created with the highest quality selection, versus the lowest quality selection. We have found minor observable difference in the actual printed document.

Please make sure that the images you take are done in good lighting and with steady hands. For newer phones such as the Nexus One, the "High" image quality option works well; whereas with an older phone such as the G1, "Highest" option may be preferred.

Configuration Options

Image Quality (Compression Choices)

You may select from the following three choices, representing a trade-off between print quality and electronic document size.

  • Highest- this is the picture as produced by your phone's camera. No compression or resampling is done.
  • High- this corresponds to a JPEG quality value of 75, and is excellent for most documents.
  • Low- This corresponds to a JPEG quality value of 50, and is good for emailing documents. Where possible, the document resolution is also scaled to the appropriate paper size.

Paper Size

You may select from the following:

  • US Letter (default in USA)
  • US Legal
  • A4 (default outside USA)
Your document is scaled to this size. The paper size selection in combination with the print quality may substantially reduce your document size on the SD card.

Automatically Rotate

If selected (default), a landscape image will automatically be rotated clockwise to become portrait.

Automatically Enhance [Version 2.4.3+]

If selected (default is unselected), perspective correction app will start automatically when you take an image with the camera.

Camera Type

We normally recommend using the stock camera. However, in some of the newer HTC phones (Evo, Incredible) the camera application occasionally returns a low-resolution image even though the camera itself is a high-resolution camera. In most cases, retaking the image usually returns in a high-resolution image. (Please note that this is not an issue with the Document Scanner app, but is a behavior of the stock camera.)

Clear Google Docs Authentication

If selected, the Google Docs authentication token will be cleared. Clearing the authentication token will let you choose a different Google Account.

Known Issues & Limitations

If you see a message that requests you to send a bug-report, it means that the application has detected an inconsistent state. If you see this message, please go to the Options menu and send us an email by selecting "Email us" option and describing the situation under which it happened. That will greatly help find and fix the issues quickly.
  • Unable to make PDF/ No menu to share PDF: We have a few reports of this happening on Android™ 4.1.x+ Galaxy S II/III and Galaxy Note phones. 2.9.15 should fix this issue. Please let us know if you are still experiencing this problem.
  • Google Docs Upload Fails (as of October 10, 2011): It appears that Google may have changed part of the Google Docs interface. We have modified the implementation in 2.6.4 so this will not be a problem for Android 2.1+ users. We are still working on a solution for pre-2.1 users.
  • Very large files are hard to email: Google email can hang when sending large emails. If your emails are getting stuck in the outbox, please consider more aggressive compression options for creating the PDF files.

Version History

2.9.15 (2013-04-15)

  • Resolved issue that some users (4.1.1+) were experiencing when creating a PDF.

2.9.14 (2013-03-25)

  • Resolved some of the issues users are seeing while cropping in landscape mode.

2.9.13 (2013-03-09)

  • Request disabling of GPU-rendering for Cropping window. It should resolve some of the issues users are seeing while cropping in landscape mode. Please let us know if you continue to see this issue.

2.9.12 (2013-02-03)

  • Support for Microsoft Sky Drive.

2.9.11 (2013-01-11)

  • Added additional error checks.

2.9.8-10 (2012-10)

  • Support for Hindi.

2.9.7 (2012-07-23)

  • Handling of certain error conditions.

2.9.6 (2012-06-27)

  • Support for cloud printing through integration with third party apps Cloudprint and breezy.

2.9.5 (2012-06-23)

  • Build for new Android SDK.

2.9.4 (2012-05-15)

  • Warning checks for SD card full.
  • Warn on Adobe Acrobat Reader's bug where it refuses to let other application view PDF files.

2.9.2 (2012-04-03)

  • Added an new B/W conversion option. You now have two different choices of algorithms. First tends to work better for text documents, whereas the second one may work better for images.

2.9.0-2.9.1 (2012-03-28)

  • Major improvements in speed.
  • Minor UI updates.

2.8.x (2011-12-24 through 2012-02-19)

  • New features: Significant improvements to Black/White conversion.

2.7.1 (2011-12-09)

  • Bug fix: Previous release caused the number 7 to be excluded from file names. This has been fixed.

2.7.0 (2011-12-04)

  • New feature: The app now allows you to use any valid file name as the PDF document name. You can now use spaces in file names. It should also help those using non-English characters.
  • New feature: You can copy your PDF files to a folder on the SD card rather than just the root.
  • New feature: Support for SugarSync.
  • New feature: Support for other cloud services such as FTP, WEBDAV, etc by use of the "Share" button to send the PDF to other apps.

2.6.4-2.6.6 (2011-10-16/2011-10-17)

  • Handle Google Docs API Change: Google Docs recently changed their API. It causes the upload to fail. It has been fixed for Android 2.1+. You will also need to install the Google Docs application from the market.
  • Bug fix: In some cases, deleting a page did not delete the corresponding enhanced image. This caused pages to appear out of order.
  • Bug fix: There have been complaints from a number of users (primarily Droid X/X2) that the cropping view appears black and four corners can not be selected. While we have not been able to replicate this issue, we found one bug that could potentially explain it. That has been fixed.

Older Releases

2.6.3 (2011-08-08)

  • Bug fix: in some cases, the four point perspective selection showed the corners in a different spot than they actually should have been. This has been fixed. Please send us an email if you still see this issue.

2.6.2 (2011-07-25)

  • Bug fix: in some cases, pressing cancel/back from the corner selection still kept the corrected image. That has been fixed.

2.6 (2011-07-17)

  • Simplified the perspective correction interface.

2.5.6 (2011-06-12)

  • More memory usage improvements- this houls greatly help Evo users that were running out of memory while cropping.

2.5.5 (2011-06-09)

  • Faster and more memory-efficient under-the-finger preview. Some users were seeing a crash by running out of memory. This fix should resolve this issue.

2.5.4 (2011-05-16)

  • New feature: An under-the-finger preview when doing perspective correction. It will be easier to see the selected points.

2.5.3 (2011-04-28)

  • Improved memory usage.

2.5.2 (2011-04-17)

  • Internal bug fixes.

2.5/2.5.1 (2011-02-19)

  • New feature: Integrated perspective correction directly within the main app.

Perspective Correction 2.0.3 (2011-02-14)

  • Added a much larger preview for corner detection.

2.4.4 (2011-02-08)

  • New feature: Added a quick scan mode. It allows you to take a picture and immediately covert to PDF and upload it- all with a single click. If you have not chosen the upload method in the options, upload will be selected interactively as before. If you have set the "automatically enhance" option, you will be taken to the corner detection.

Perspective Correction 2.0.1/2 (2011-01-23/24)

  • Substantial improvements to the corner detection algorithm. Hopefully users will seldom need to select their own corners- especially if the image is taken on a dark background and does not have too much reflection.

2.4.3 (2010-12-27)

  • Improved integration with perspective-correction add-on. Provides an option to automatically start perspective correction and image enhancement once you capture an image with the camera.
  • Work-around for X10 Xperia phones where the camera image was not being added to the Document Scanner Gallery

Perspective Correction 2.0 (2010-12-26)

  • Completely reimplemented perspective correction- automatically finds the four corners and then gives you the capability to edit the corners.
  • Completely reimplemented greyscale and black/white mechanism gives better results and smaller files.

2.4.2 (2010-12-20)

  • New feature: Improvements to GDocs Upload. The upload now happens in the backgroudn with the status available in the notification bar.
  • New feature: When sending an email, the PDF name is now the default subject.

2.4.1

  • New feature: Improvements to image preview.

2.4 (2010-11-12)

  • New feature: Upload to Evernote
  • New feature: Added larger preview for images.
  • Bug fix: Some trial users were seeing a crash when starting perspective correction.
  • New feature: Quick start- Touching the "+" sign on the main screen starts a document with the date as the PDF filename.
  • Improvements in the look and feel, and more images with buttons

2.3.1 (2010-10-18)

  • Bug fix: some users were seeing a crash on opening the app due to some timestamp issues.

Perspective Correction 1.8 (2010-10-14)

  • Handle an "OutOfMemory" error

2.3 (2010-10-11)

  • A NEW AND MORE INTUITIVE USER INTERFACE
  • Removed Ads from the 7-day trial version

2.2.2 (2010-10-06)

  • A re-release with no changes to deal with an issue with the Android market. The prblem was eventually discovered to be an Android market problem and fixed by Google.

2.2.1 (2010-10-04)

  • Fixed a bug where the phone was returning "FileNotFoundException" when inserting an image or taking a picture. The symptom was that taking pictures did not show any pictures in the list and the app still said "No Pages... Please capture a page to begin."

Perspective Correction 1.7 (2010-10-01)

  • Allow crop only by optionally constraining the selection to a rectangle

2.2 (2010-09-27)

  • Added an experimental "Upload to Google Docs with OCR" capability
  • Allow use of _ and - in file names

Perspective Correction 1.6 (2010-09-24)

  • For Android 2.2/Froyo, allow installation to SD Card
  • Internal improvements

2.1 (2010-09-23)

  • Add "Upload to Dropbox" capability
  • For Android 2.2/Froyo, allow installation to SD Card

2.0.3 (2010-09-17)

  • Built-in camera: In some cases, if the button press to take the picture was (erroneously) a long-press, the camera would hang and required a reboot. This has been fixed.
  • Built-in camera: if the button was (erroneously) pressed multiple times to take the picture, it could potentially fail. This has been fixed.
  • Built-in camera: Use of the flashlight has been removed. The flashlight is a deprecated capability in the Android Operating System.

Perspective Correction 1.5 (2010-09-09)

  • Modified so that it shows in the home page. Many people buy the add-on by mistake. This helps by letting them know to buy the base application.

2.0.1/2.0.2 (2010-09-07)

  • When a document is opened, the last image is selected. It was a little confusing earlier because images are always added at the end, and the first image was selected.
  • Internal optimizations to improve performance

Perspective Correction 1.4 (2010-09-01)

  • Added pure black and white option with thresholding

Perspective Correction 1.3 (2010-08-24)

  • Added option to reduce resolution while doing perspective correction

Perspective Correction 1.2 (2010-08-16)

  • Added contrast slider

Perspective Correction 1.1 (2010-08-08)

  • Reduced memory footprint during perspective correction

2.0 (2010-08-08)

  • New feature: Perspective correction and cropping provided through a separate add-on
  • Corrected the order in which images are inserted- new images are now inserted at the end of the document rather than the beginning
  • Handle more potential error conditions

1.4.8 (2010-07-28)

  • For HTC Incredible- Continue even if the SD Card is not mounted. This is done because the SD card is optional in the HTC Incredible.
  • Handle more potential error conditions

1.4.7 (2010-07-20)

  • Handles even more potential error conditions and prints messages for these cases, including SD card full.

1.4.6 (2010-07-05)

  • New feature: Ability for automatic rotation to portrait. If this option is set (default), the image will automatically be rotated clockwise to make it portrait.
  • Handles even more potential error conditions and prints messages for these cases.

1.4.3 (2010-06-25), 1.4.4 (2010-06-30)

  • Handles many more potential error conditions- more clarifications for potential camera failures and SD card errors.

1.4.2 (2010-06-16)

  • A clarification dialog box when the external camera application returns a poor-quality image. It lets you choose between the external camera application and the built-in Document Scanner as well letting you keep the original poor-quality image.
  • Initial German (DE) localization

1.4.1 (2010-06-14)

  • New feature: Upload to Google Docs. You can use this feature to share and store the PDF documents you create
  • An option to let you choose your phone's camera or Document Scanner's built-in camera. Some of the new HTC phones/updates (Eris 2.1 update, Incredible, Evo, Legend) are inconsistent in how they return images to other applications, and sometimes they return poor quality images.
  • Reduced memory foot-print during rotation of an image
  • Advertising added to the 7-day trial version.

1.3.0 (2010-05-26)

  • Camera improvements to deal with multiple types of camera interfaces for various Android phones
  • French and Spanish localization

1.2.0 (2010-05-23)

  • New feature: ability to insert and existing JPEG image
  • New feature: ability to rename an existing document
  • New feature: ability to reorder pages

1.1.1 (2010-05-16)

  • Modified compression defaults

1.1.0 (2010-05-15)

  • Support for JPEG file compression and paper sizes

1.0.1Trial (2010-04-24)

  • Ad-supported trial
  • Fixed two known crashes

1.0 (2010-04-24)

  • Initial release