Scan and Sign Documents With iOS 11

A new feature in the Notes app in iOS 11 is the ability to scan documents using your iPad or iPhone camera. You can automatically capture pages in a multipage document and even sign the documents before sharing them or saving them out to iCloud Drive.

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Video Transcript: So a new feature in iOS 11 is the ability to scan documents in the Notes app. Before we had lots of third party apps that could do this. But now it's nice to have this built into the Notes app. You can also sign documents. There's even a special feature for doing this with the Apple pencil if you have an iPad Pro. 
Let's start off with an iPad Air 2 here and I'm going to use the Notes app. I'm going to create a new document and I'm going to hit the plus button at the top right corner of the keyboard. Hit scan documents. You can see right away the document appears there. I don't have to be straight on to capture it. You see it captured it even though it was kind of in a trapezoid position there. It's better if it's straight on because it will help you later if you need to crop but it doesn't have to be.
Now I can go in and capture another document if I wanted. I can keep going to capture multi page documents. But I'm going to just finish with this one. Notice I can switch from Auto to Manual to take a manual picture of it rather than having it do the automatic thing. Then I can use that big white shutter button there. I can also go to these filtering options which are similar to what you have if you're doing a regular scanner. You can can do gray scale, black and white, photo quality. I'm going to stick with just the color scan quality for this.
I'm going to hit Save at the bottom and it saves it here as a document inside of the note. I can tap on it to go into it and then I can hit the plus button at the bottom to add another document. I can hit Trash to delete it. Hit the Filters button to change its filtering right now. I can hit the Crop button to record it. Notice how I get the original photo. So the original photo is saved as a part of that. I can rotate it very easily. I can also sign it. 
Now for signing on an iPhone or an iPad without an Apple pencil you can hit the Markup button, the Share button rather at the top, and then the Markup button. Go into Markup, you can choose all the tools at the bottom, and you can use your finger to sign. Then you hit Done and you can see it's there and signed. I can use the Share button there as well to email this document. Send it by Messages, Drop Box. Any other method I want. Even create a PDF that will then appear in my iCloud Drive. 
Now with my iPad Pro, with an Apple pencil, I can just tap the screen and it immediately goes into Markup tools. I can sign with my pencil. So it makes it super simple if you've got one of these. 
Now if you have an iPhone it works basically the same way. You hit the plus button there at the top. Scan documents and then it does the same thing. It grabs it and you have the same options. They're just in slightly different places on the screen. You can go into it and to sign it you can use the Markup tools and Share it from there.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Scan and Sign Documents With iOS 11”

Micha David

7 years ago

The plus sign above the keyboard was gone!!!!! No + while using my 6S. It took me a couple of hours to investigate and find out the solution for everybody: Make sure you are in the iCloud folder in Notes app and not your Gmail folder otherwise you will not get the + above the keyboard and you won’t be able to scan, sign or annotate documents. All the Best from Israel.

Lubomir

well,lucky Micha! I can not make it on my iPad Air...there is not "+" on the keyboard,but some signs for bold,italic and underline writing.Any other idea how to get that "+" ?

Gary Rosenzweig

Lubomir: Did you check to see whether your note is an iCloud one? Not local or Google or something else?

JCooper

Thanks Gary, this is so informative! On my iPhone 7+, there is no 'markup' option when share is pressed. I tried to add by choosing More, but no luck there. Can you share how to get Markup added to the share toolkit? Thank you!

JCooper: Markup is there by default. You don't need to add it. Are using iOS 11?

Comments Closed.

Scan and Sign Documents With iOS 11

Comments: 5 Responses to “Scan and Sign Documents With iOS 11”

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