Digitizing a Paper Document

From a phone photo of a physical page to a clean, searchable PDF.

The photo has to be captured and cropped first since every later step works on that image, not the original paper. OCR is what actually makes the difference between a picture of text and text you can search, select, and copy -- without it, the file is a scanned document, not a digitized one, even though it looks the same. Cropping again after OCR catches any margin that survived the first pass. Compression is last because OCR'd scans can be noticeably larger than a simple photo, especially for multi-page documents.

Each step opens as its own tool -- download from one, upload into the next, same as any free tool on the site.