"What we do have are phones, and those phones have very good cameras. That's where scanning apps come in. These apps allow you to take photos of each page of a paper document, crop out the edges of the photo and straighten everything, then combine those photos into a PDF file. A scanning app is handy, but there's a catch: a lot of the apps out there are a mess."
"FairScan creator Pierre-Yves Nicolas wrote in a blog post last year that he had previously tried several Android apps for scanning documents. "All of them exhibited behaviors that I certainly don't want," he says. These behaviors included obvious things like ads, hidden privacy violations, and shady practices such as storing your documents in the cloud-then using them to train AI-with only a tiny text prompt notifying you this is happening. FairScan, which is both free and open source, doesn't do any of that. It scans."
"To get started, simply install the app. And yes, it's Android-only for now, but you can download it from the Google Play Store as well as F-Droid, the repository for open source Android apps. Get the document you want to scan ready, placing it on a flat surface in a well-lit room. Then aim your camera at the first page. A green box will surround the page-adjust until it's surrounding the portion of the document you want to scan. Take the picture when you're ready."
FairScan is a free, open-source Android app that scans paper documents using a phone camera. The app captures photos of each page, auto-detects and crops edges, straightens images, and combines pages into a PDF. FairScan avoids ads, cloud storage, and data-harvesting practices, keeping scans local and not using documents to train AI. The app is available from Google Play and F-Droid. To scan, place a document on a flat, well-lit surface, aim the camera, adjust until a green box surrounds the page, and capture. Additional pages can be added with a plus button to create multipage PDFs.
Read at WIRED
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